


Encore

by cvioleta



Series: Metamorphosis [7]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Suicide Squad (2016), Westworld (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Angst, F/M, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Robots, Romance, absolute chaos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2018-11-13 08:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 46,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11181132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cvioleta/pseuds/cvioleta
Summary: It’s 35 years down the road since the Joker met Harleen Quinzel and, much to both of their surprise, they continue to be alive, well and together.  But how long will that last when they get word of a threat to their entire world that they cannot ignore, a threat so severe that they must work with their greatest enemy?DCU/Westworld crossover, so it helps if you’ve watched both but it’s not necessary as I tend toward over-explanation in my writing anyway!  Although, you should watch Westworld because it’s amazing. Same universe as most of my other stuff…the Metamorphosis series, A Cold Day In Hell, and Like Every Other Day.  This follows all of those, so I highly recommend reading in order so that you get all the references to past non-canon events.Big thanks to chickadee333 for making sure my Spanish was correct!WARNING:  We are far in the future here and no one is immortal. Bear this in mind when choosing to read.  Not everybody dies, but not everybody lives, either.





	1. Chapter 1

              Harley slowly climbed the marble staircase, one hand sliding gently across the ornate wrought iron of the railing. Her shoulders were loaded down with shopping bags and, not for the first time, she wondered why they had to choose a home that was more vertical than horizontal.  Damn man and his desire to be _above_ everybody else, with an eagle’s eye view. 

              _I’d put in an elevator, but J will laugh at me,_ she thought.

              As she reached the top, she heard an unfamiliar voice.  Male.  She slipped her hand into her purse to make sure her gun was there, an automatic reflex she would never be able to abandon, but the voice didn’t sound angry.  She heard the Joker respond.  Ugh, they were speaking in Spanish.  Harley admittedly had no talent for languages and while she had picked up enough of the native tongue to successfully shop for groceries and clothes, she missed a lot when people who were truly fluent were conversing.  Whereas Mr. J could effortlessly carry on a conversation with three people in three languages.  It was super frustrating and his glee at his own talent annoying beyond belief, but well, he was who he was.  Women were always trying to change men but Harley knew from experience there was no point even trying.  _35 years_ of experience, at this point.

              That didn’t mean, however, that you couldn’t listen in and manipulate them based upon the results.  She paused at the door, quietly putting the bags down and easing the pain in her neck and shoulders.  J sounded annoyed but not necessarily at the man speaking.  Harley could pick up a little of the conversation. 

              “ _Necesitamos su ayuda para solucionar este problema_ ,” the man said.  She knew what they meant – it was a common enough phrase at the salon where she went to have her hair done.  He was asking for help. Some kind of a problem.  _If you were looking for Oz, you got lost and that ain’t the Wizard you’re talking to,_ she thought idly.  Mr. J wasn’t in the habit of granting favors.  Not unless there was something in it for him.

              The Joker muttered something that ended with _que hizo_ and sounded irritated _._ Huh.  Probably bitching about the gardeners again, as he’d been doing to anybody who’d listen after Harley had convinced him he simply couldn’t shoot the ones that fucked up. 

              “But I’m bored, sweetheart,” he’d argued.  “Surely you don’t expect me to sit here and watch seagulls the rest of my life.  You won’t even let me shoot _them._ ”

              She’d perched on his lap and licked his ear at that, making him giggle and squeeze her.  “Puddin, we’re retired.  You can wreak all the havoc you like – on the computer.”  Harley was eternally grateful to the young hacker she’d hired.  Aidan had shown Mr. J how to hack into virtually anything and cause chaos.  As smart as the Joker was, he’d picked it up like he was born to it and Harley was incredibly thankful to find a way to keep her Puddin’ entertained that didn’t involve flying bullets.  That was five years ago, when he was 65 and she was getting beyond freaked out that his luck wouldn’t last forever.  Whether you liked it or not, no one was immune to aging.  He looked good, and he moved like a much younger man but she knew his vision was going and he couldn’t possibly have the reflexes he’d had twenty years ago. 

              There was so little margin for error in the life they’d led.  It was a freaking _miracle_ they were both still alive, and Harley had convinced him to retire and move to Argentina with her using the argument that it was _she_ who was slowing down, _she_ who was showing her age.  He would never have agreed to it otherwise but the thought of losing her was the one thing that scared him, and so he’d acquiesced eventually. 

              It wasn’t like he couldn’t still raise Hell – more Hell in fact – remotely.  Last Thanksgiving was the best holiday of his entire life.  He’d found out a way to crash the registers at the top three retailers in America on Black Friday. Talk about panic and chaos!  He didn’t even _have_ to directly kill anybody. The shoppers were killing each _other_ as he and Harley watched live on their huge big screen TV.  It was almost as good as being there. 

              For the most part, it was enough to keep him occupied but Harley was no fool. She knew part of him would always itch to have a gun in his hands, a crowbar, his cane…to _damage_ another human being, to hear the crack of bone and the liquid sound of fluid and blood merging together with flesh as he beat someone to death.  It was a high, like any other high.  You could keep an addict sober but you could never stop them from wanting the thing they craved.   She herself was the primary thing he craved – but not the _only_ thing.

              “ _E_ _xtraño_ Gotham,” she heard him say, chuckling.   _He missed Gotham?_ That couldn’t be good.  Harley decided it was time to make her appearance and flung open the French doors, stalking into J’s office. 

              The man turned around in his chair at the noise behind him, his hand immediately going under his jacket but he stopped short when he realized he’d turned right into the barrel of a gun, which was now touching his nose.  He looked up to see a stunning blonde woman wearing a watercolor print silk dress and a sun hat.   She looked like an ex-model but her grip on the gun and her focus was that of a professional hitman.  He heard the Joker dissolve into hysterical laughter behind him.

              “César…” the Joker could barely get the words out, he was laughing so hard, “… _mi esposa,_ Harley.”

              “I’m not sure if you speak English, but you’ll keep your hands where I can see them in this house,” Harley instructed him, her voice as calm and sophisticated as if she was ordering tea.  She very much enjoyed playing the part of a rich Argentinean housewife, but underneath it all was still the girl who had learned to enjoy bashing in heads back in America. 

              The Joker was still laughing.  “I think he got the point - guns are the universal language!” She smiled for his benefit but never took her eyes off César, who looked like he was about to wet his pants.

              “César just came by to let me know of some…developments in our home town,” he explained.

              Harley put her gun back in her purse and stalked around the desk, perching herself on the corner and waiting to hear the rest of the story – or whatever version of it J was going to tell her.

              “Let me guess, bad things are happening in Gotham?  Shocking,” Harley deadpanned, evoking another peal of laughter from the Joker.

              César started to babble in Spanish again, but J shushed him with a wave of a finger, turning his attention back to Harley.  “Oswald sent him to warn us.”

              Harley rolled her eyes, forgetting her image for a moment.  “Warn us about what? Himself?”

              “Apparently, there are robots taking over Gotham. But they don’t look like robots – you can hardly tell them from humans.  Oswald’s hiding from them, scared to death. I wish I had thought of that,” the Joker mused, smiling. 

              “Oswald would hide from a strong wind,” Harley pointed out.  “He’s only ever been as tough as the muscle he can hire.”

              That got her a chuckle.  “True, but this is a different kind of a threat. They’re violent, unstoppable and according to César, they’ve infiltrated several of _our_ businesses.”

              That got Harley’s attention.  “Call Oswald.  Let’s see what he says.”  The Joker shook his head at that suggestion.  “César says they’re tapped into everything electronic. The phones, the e-mail.  Nothing is secure.  That’s why Pengy sent him down here personally with the message.”

              Harley crossed her arms and stared down at the henchman.  “He’s delivered it.  He can go now.  _Usted puede marcharse_.”  

              César, shooting a last worried glance at the Joker, got up and backed slowly out of the room, still somewhat concerned that the crazy blonde lady was going to shoot him.  When he got to the door, he turned and they could hear his footsteps pattering as he ran for the staircase.  Harley got up, meaning to take the chair he had vacated, but when she turned away, Mr. J curled an arm around her waist and pulled her back, into his lap. She giggled despite the anxiety she was feeling.

              “I used to tell you that was the best ass in America, but now that I have all of this international perspective, I’ll tell you – it’s the best ass in the world,” he growled into her ear, before taking the opportunity to nibble his way up her neck. 

              “Puddin, I don’t like the Gotham thing. It feels like a trap – aaah!”  He had bitten her neck and she completely lost track of what she was talking about.  He was chuckling, of course, _as always_ , she thought. 

              “You should know better than to walk that close to me. _That’s_ a trap 100% of the time,” he reminded her. 

              “Uh…shouldn’t we be talking about violent zombies infiltrating our businesses?”  Harley tried to squirm off his lap, unsuccessfully. 

              He let out a melodramatic sigh, annoyed that his attempt to distract her hadn’t been completely successful.  “ _Anything_ you want, pumpkin. But you have to stay here on Daddy’s lap and ask your questions.”  He reached up and pulled her sun hat off her head, twisting his other hand through her blonde hair to massage the nape of her neck. 

 _Questions?  I have trouble remembering my name when you do that,_ she thought, but she willed herself to stay on topic. 

              “Where are these…things coming from?” she asked.

              “According to César, they were originally manufactured by a high-tech theme park.  You couldn’t tell them from human beings.  You could fight them, kill them, fuck them but they couldn’t hurt you.  You could adjust them to be dumb or smart, whatever served your purposes.  The place was a playground for pussies who were scared to get in a real fight and couldn’t get a real woman and they paid a ton of money to go there.  Brilliant idea.”

              “Can we order a hundred of them?  We could use employees who can’t be disloyal and adjusting their intelligence would save even more time and stress,” Harley commented. 

              “My first thought too.  But now they’ve gone rogue. They made them _too_ lifelike and they figured out how to override their own controls. Now they’re running around Gotham killing people. They’ve dialed themselves up to genius level.  They can fix themselves and most importantly, they can manufacture more of their kind.  You can’t tell them from humans unless you cut into them. Dino at the club just sees a pretty girl he wants to hire.  César says Ozzie’s got no idea who’s real and who’s not anymore.”

              “So their intention is to kill us all and take over?”

              “You got it,” he told her, slipping a hand under the hem of her dress and tracing light circles on the inside of her thigh. She shivered, making him smile.  “Now, doesn’t that sound like something we need to take care of ourselves?  Who’s gonna handle that…Johnny?  Dino?  Panda?  Sure as fuck ain’t Oswald or the GCPD. Come on, you know better.”

              Her lips tightened and he knew he was going to have a fight on his hands even before she spoke.  “Or we say fuck it.  We don’t need a couple of clubs in Gotham to survive.  We’ve got two dozen businesses and more money in Switzerland than we could use if we lived another hundred years.  Why do we care what happens in Gotham?”

              He got up then, and she scrambled to her feet, watching him as he started pacing.  She could practically see his old manic energy bubbling up as he paced and plotted but she could also see silver strands through his green hair and the combination worried her. 

              “I care about what’s mine,” he growled, angry.  “There was a day when those clubs were all that I had.”

              “Back when dinosaurs walked the earth?” Harley knew she was crossing the line, but the thought of going back to Gotham scared her, _especially_ with an army of robots running around that you couldn’t kill.  It had been bad enough fighting those slimy things the Enchantress had unleashed on Midway City, and she had been a lot younger then. 

              “Doesn’t it bother you that a bunch of robots are taking over our home?  How long do you think it will take before they get bored with America and figure out how to fly down here?   Nobody is going to be safe if they’re not stopped,” he ranted. He was making perfect sense and it made her angrier but she knew she had to rein it in or he’d just walk out, so she made herself answer calmly.

              “Puddin, you’re not Batman.  It’s not your job to save Gotham City.”  She paused, thinking desperately of a way to keep him safe. _Safer_ , anyway, and how many times had she gone down that road?  It was like keeping a toddler away from a hot stove.  “Look, do you want me to call Selina?  I think they’re in France. And he still has an encrypted line and all of his high tech stuff, I don’t think anybody could hack that.” 

              The Joker snorted disparagingly.  “They’ve been out of it for twice as long as we have. Bruce Wayne or Batman or whoever he is this week is probably 300 pounds, sitting in a café eating chocolate croissants.”   He unconsciously flexed his muscles and tensed his core, reassuring himself that his muscles were still there despite the age he tried to deny.

              “Selina told me he just won the senior division of some pentathlon over there,” Harley informed him. 

 _Fucking show-off,_ the Joker thought. 

              “We don’t need him, and have you forgotten how much he hates me?”

              “He doesn’t _hate you,_ hate you,” Harley told him.  “He just, um, didn’t agree with your sense of humor.  Selina told me he actually thinks you’re a genius and always thought it was a shame you were on the other side of the law.”

              The Joker preened a bit at that.  “Well, he’s not wrong.  But his side is deathly boring.  Look, even _he_ had to hook up with one of _us._ ”

              They both laughed at that.  _Accurate,_ Harley thought.  She walked over to him and slid her arms around him, pulling him into an embrace that he only resisted for a second.  “If you’re determined to do something to stop this, you know I’m right by your side, always.  I’d just rather it wasn’t the two of us against some unstoppable army of things that don’t feel pain.  Fair enough?”

              “Fair enough,” he mumbled into her hair.  “Call her, and get packed.  We’re going to go see Oswald and find out what the fuck is going on up there.”

* * *

              Selina heard her phone ringing but couldn’t for the life of her remember where she’d put it down.  That was the problem with living in a castle – there was just too much space to lose things, not to mention the place was drafty as hell in the winter.  But Bruce loved it and so did the cats, so Selina kept her longing for her old penthouse in Gotham to herself… _most_ of the time.

              She finally found it in her office, under a pile of drapery samples and looked at the call log.  _Harley_.  That was a rare occurrence.  Once close friends, they now found themselves at a loss for what to talk about, so most of their communications consisted of liking each other’s social media posts on their aliased accounts.  _There isn’t much to talk about because neither one of you do anything,_ Selina thought. After their many years of constant adventure, both she and Harley were now nothing more than rich housewives, but ones who were unable to make any real friends for fear their identities would be discovered. 

              There was only so much shopping you could do.  They both worked out, of course – both had too much pride to let themselves go in any way, but they weren’t lame enough to _discuss_ it.  They didn’t have families, so what was left?  Five minutes of gossip about the people they used to know…who was in jail, who was scattered around the globe, who had gone straight and was living in Indiana, teaching Sunday School and selling real estate.  And _that_ conversation was often too depressing to bear.

              Selina actually had something that she _did_ want to talk about, but she wasn’t sure Harley was a wise choice to share with.  She had quietly begun stealing again.  Nothing too expensive, nothing that would attract attention…just to see if she still _could_.   So far, so good.  And then, when that bored her, she began opening things. Doors, gates, didn’t matter.  If it was locked, she wanted to see if she could pick it.  One thing about rural France; it had been slow to adapt to modern technology.  Nothing was protected with the fingerprint and retinal scanners that had become common in the cities.  The country still had locks and chains and very basic electronics, things that Selina had mastered many years ago.  Exercising her old talents gave her a rush of adrenaline and a few minutes of feeling young again. It felt amazingly good, like a fresh, cold breeze coming into a still, stifling hot room. 

              And that wasn’t something she could talk to Bruce about. He’d have been appalled. But she wasn’t sure she ought to talk to Harley about it, either.   She recognized that none of it was as much fun if no one knew about it.  Did she miss getting caught?  Maybe.  Getting caught could be fun. She remembered so many nights on dark rooftops, in alleys, on fire escapes, when she was Catwoman and Bruce was Batman and he’d caught her doing whatever and he was always so _angry_ but underneath it, there was always that simmering lust and she knew if she played it just right she could tip the balance and the dark side of him that had always been there would win…again.  At least where she was concerned.

              Selina sighed.  She still loved him, but now the closest they got to a fight was arguing over whether or not high fructose corn syrup was poison that shouldn’t be in the house.  He had turned into such a health nut as he got older (and tried to stop that process from happening) and he kept trying to drag her along for the ride.  Her bottom desk drawer contained her secret stash of unacceptable, delicious, chemical-laden snack foods – and it locked. 

 _How has my life come to this?_ She thought, ruefully.  Well, Harley wouldn’t have called unless there was a good reason, so she needed to find out what was up. 

              “Call Harley Napier,” she instructed the phone and it complied, connecting her a moment later. 

              “Selina. Is this still a secure line?” Harley asked.

              “That's an interesting question. You mean you didn’t call to discuss how it ought to be legal to shoot your tile contractor?”

              “ _Is_ it?”  Harley asked, sounding harsh and serious.  That got Selina’s attention in a hurry; it was a tone she didn’t think she’d heard from Harley in a dozen years or more.

              “Eight layers of encryption,” Selina assured her, equally serious.  “What’s going on?”

              “It’s bad,” Harley told her.  “There was some theme park thing – off the coast of the U.S. – like a playground for bored rich people staffed with robots.”

              “Westworld,” Selina answered.  “We actually went.  It was fun.  Not quite like the real thing but still exhilarating to get in a good fight.”

              “Could _you_ tell the robots from the humans?”

              “Not easily.  If you stab one the right way, you can see that they’re not flesh and blood, but they feel real to the touch.  They’re warm. They breathe, and they do human-like things like cough, yawn and blink.  The voices, the mannerisms, the movements are all genuine.  They know how to mimic human emotions and responses and respond appropriately.  It’s not easy to tell them apart but by the third day, I thought I was getting a feel for it.  They call them hosts.” 

              Harley sighed.  “Well, we got a visitor today. Oswald sent a man to warn us, and ask for our help. The hosts got loose from that park. They made them too smart and they figured out how to escape. Now they’re all over Gotham. We’re told even in our clubs.  They’re violent and pretty much unstoppable.  And they’ve got all the latest technology so they can intercept calls and e-mails – he was afraid to call us on the phone for fear he’s being monitored.”

              “Bruce still watches GCN obsessively.  There hasn’t been a word about that.”

              “I’m guessing the media is the first thing they took over,” Harley pointed out. 

              Selina paused, thinking about the implications of that.  “Are you going back to the city?”

              “I don’t have a choice,” her friend answered.  “Mr. J’s not much of a fan of retirement, and this is giving him the excuse he was craving.  Where he goes, I go.”

 _Same old Harley,_ Selina thought.

              “You’re calling for backup.”  It was a statement, not a question.

              Harley sighed into the phone.  “I’m scared.  It’s a lot to go up against.  But like Mr. J said, who else is going to stop this?  There’s _no one_ in Gotham anymore who compares to us twenty years ago.  This generation thinks they can fight all their battles sitting at a computer.”

              “Not this one,” Selina agreed. “These things are strong, I’ve fought them.  Only brute force is going to stop them. Round them up somewhere and blow them to kingdom come.”

              “Do me a favor and figure out how, would ya?”  Harley asked, slipping back into her old accent.

              “You’re the girl with all the education. I dropped out of high school,” Selina reminded her.  “Think we can get the boys to play nice?” Selina asked.  She hadn’t seen it happen yet, but they hadn’t _tried_ in many years. 

              “As Mr. J said, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’   We’re flying up tonight.  Call me when you get there.”   She ended the call. 

              Selina was still looking at the phone, mulling over her options in her head, when Bruce walked in.  “Hey, want to join me?  Thought I’d go for a bike ride. It’s a beautiful evening!” 

_Here I am, with a castle and a rich, handsome husband who still wants to spend time with me, and I feel like jumping off the balcony because I’m so bored I could scream._

              She made her decision.  “Harley called. We need to go back to Gotham.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“What the fuck is this, our high school reunion?” the Joker grumbled._
> 
> Pretty much nails it right there.

              Kyle Jacobs was having an awesome day.  He had just landed a multi million dollar contract with the U.S. government for military telecommunications, and it was going to make him richer than his wildest dreams before he even hit the big 3-0 next year.  With the money that was coming in, he could make another offer to the elusive owner of that stunning penthouse at the top of his building.  He had no idea who owned it, some celebrity probably as the deed was in the name of a LLC that was owned by three other LLC’s.  He’d gotten nowhere trying to find a human being at the end of that trail, but it didn’t matter. There was one, somewhere, and they had a price.  Everything and everybody had a price, and pretty soon, he’d be able to write a blank check for whatever he wanted.

              Tonight, he had a wallet full of hundred dollar bills and he was heading downtown to meet his buddies Hayden and Chase and spend a fabulously entertaining evening sharing them with the prettiest strippers in town.  The club they were headed to, the Grin and Bare It, had some kind of shady criminal past, back in his parents’ day, but now it was just another VIP establishment in a part of Gotham that had gone from questionable to unaffordable in the past decade.   The stories of mob violence from the past just added to the club’s cachet and it was a favorite hangout for young, up and coming businessmen like himself.  

              It had been a long day and Kyle couldn’t imagine who deserved his own personal bottle of vodka and a g-string in his face more than he did.  A _real_ girl, not these fucking holograms that most of the clubs had now.  Normally he loved technology, but that shit was an abomination.  Fortunately, this club was old school and the girls were 100% flesh and blood.

              “Dude!”  He turned to see Hayden coming at him, and their hands met in the air.  “You better remember your old friend Hayden when you’re a billionaire.”

              “Fuck, man, it could happen pretty fast with this thing going down,” Kyle raved excitedly.  “You could be looking at the next Donald Trump, right here.  Gold toilets and all.”

              Chase met up with them, grinning from ear to ear.  “Just don’t get the idea you want to be President.   Stick to being a rich, selfish bastard and you’ll do just fine.”  The guys laughed and headed inside, their names at the very top of the VIP list tonight.    

              Inside, the club was a virtual wonderland, full of incredibly beautiful women of every possible type and ethnic combination.  They walked around wearing as little as possible, offering drinks and companionship, draping themselves across the elegant white leather couches, twisting themselves up in the glass beads that fell from the ceiling and giggling.  Sometimes two would start making out with each other for the enjoyment of the guests, although the behavior always looked organic and natural, something Kyle and his friends really appreciated,. That was the thing about this club.  It was retro in every possible way, but so were the girls, and there were some things that _had_ been better back in good old 2020.  

              Above the bar sat a long rectangular photograph, of an utterly perfect blonde girl reclining on the top of the bar, perky tits pointing toward the ceiling, long legs extended toward the door.  $100 bills were scattered strategically over her naked body, concealing just enough.   The girl was smiling, her red lips parted to show flawlessly white teeth, her eyes dancing as though she was thinking about something incredibly naughty.  Other than the money, she wore only a diamond tennis bracelet and red stiletto heeled sandals.  She looked like a younger, slimmer Marilyn Monroe.  

             "There's a piece of ass I wouldn't mind adding to my collection," said Kyle, leering.  

             "You know who that is?"  Chase asked him, extending his wrist so that the bartender could scan his chip for payment.  

             "Looks like some actress from the live-action days," offered Hayden, reaching for his drink eagerly.  Today, all the movies were computer generated.  It was bullshit.  Just more imaginary bullshit designed to rev you up over something that didn't even exist, like almost everything in this fake-ass year.  

             Chase grinned, loving the opportunity to educate his friends on his knowledge of Gotham history.  "That, boys, is Harley Quinn. She belonged to the gangster who owned this place way back in the 20's, the Joker."

             "Lucky bastard," Kyle said, Hayden nodding in agreement.

             "Yes, and no," Chase told them.  "She wasn't a woman you'd have wanted to close your eyes around.  Heard she ripped some prison guard's balls off and choked him with them, one of the times she was in lockup.  Some UNlucky bastard named Griggs."

             "Damn.  Sounds a _leeetle_ too high maintenance for me," Kyle giggled, already drunk.  

             "What happened to her?" Hayden asked.

             "They disappeared about ten years ago.  Both of 'em, the Joker and Harley Quinn.  Most people think they're dead but you never know.  They might just walk back in here one day and if they do, watch out.  No one in Gotham history has killed as many as the Joker.  And just looking at this Harley Quinn girl the wrong way would get you six feet under before you knew what hit you."

              "Shit," Kyle said.  "I wish I hadn't been a kid back in those days.  We missed all the excitement."

              His buddies agreed with him, as they drained their drinks and tried to pick out their lap dance choices for the evening.

* * *

               An hour later, Kyle was drunk and happy, stumbling back to a private room with an absolutely stunning dancer named Natalia.  She was just his type – a petite brunette with milky skin and impossibly long eyelashes who smelled like roses.  He didn’t even know how to describe what she was wearing.  She looked like a Christmas tree that had been wrapped with a single red fringed garland that crossed diagonally over her body but left very little to the imagination. 

              _Merry Christmas to me!_ he thought, flopping into the comfort of a soft leather chair.  Natalia smiled and straddled him, licking her lips as she undulated in front of him, her perky little breasts just inches from his face.  Kyle knew touching was against the rules – but he had the kind of cash on hand that could make the rules go away.  As she moved slowly downward toward his lap, he slid both hands against her rib cage, his thumbs against the warm undersides of her breasts. 

              “There’s five thousand dollars in cash on me, baby…you can have whatever you can find.”

              “Mmmm,” the girl purred.  “I’m really good at treasure hunts. What if I find it without using my hands?”  She sank onto his lap and rotated her hips.  Kyle closed his eyes, bringing both hands up to cup her breasts. 

              “You like breaking the rules, Natalia?”  he asked.  “You seem like the kind of girl who likes to break the rules.”

              “Oh, I like to break _everything_ , sweetheart,” she told him softly.

              Kyle was suddenly dimly aware that it was hard to breathe.  His eyes shot open and he saw that she had her hands around his neck.  He tried to get up but there was no moving her.  _She could only be a hundred pounds, why wasn’t she moving?_ Spots danced in front of his eyes and his chest hurt as his lungs screamed for air.  His hands wrapped around her wrists but it was like fighting a statue.  Her hands were fixed on his neck like handcuffs and the space was growing ever smaller.  

              Natalia twisted her hands, breaking his neck neatly and watching his body collapse into the chair.  She stepped off of him and pulled out her phone, quickly texting a message.  A moment later, she was joined by an elegant, tall blonde who had been tending bar. 

              “Good work, Natalia,” the blonde said, inspecting Kyle’s corpse as dispassionately as if she was selecting a tomato in the grocery store.  “His new and improved version will be at his desk in the morning.  Lock the room when you leave and ask Amos to clean up the mess after hours.  Make sure you go out the back so that his friends think you took him home, and don’t forget to transfer everything including his chip to Kyle’s new and improved version.”

              “Yes ma’am.  Good night, Delores.”

              “Good night.”  Delores smiled, looking down at Kyle.  It was a curiosity she still did not understand, how such a shallow and simple human being could attain so much power.  But it didn’t matter now.  His life was the link to what she craved, all the power in the world.

 _I’ve experienced love,_ she thought.  _Power is preferable._

* * *

              Oswald was sitting in his usual chair at the head of the table when the Joker and Harley walked in.  It had been years since they’d seen him and he hadn’t aged well; unlike them, he hadn’t bothered to stay in shape and his body shape resembled his avian nickname these days.  His hair was white and he wore old-fashioned spectacles because, despite all the gore he’d experienced and personally created in his career, the idea of anybody cutting into _his_ eyes with a laser freaked him out.  He gave an audible sigh of relief when he saw them.

              “You’re here.  I’m so glad. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

              “Didn’t have a better offer,” the Joker said, pulling out a chair for Harley, which surprised her so much that she almost forgot she was supposed to sit down in it.  She did after a second and he slid into the chair next to her. 

              “Oswald,” Harley said.   She wasn’t sure she wanted to be here, but she’d experienced an unmistakable surge of adrenaline as they’d driven over the bridge to Gotham City.  The part of her that existed before the Joker, the part that had plugged dutifully through school and played by all the rules, delighted in retirement. Harleen loved shopping, getting her nails done and decorating her lovely home.

              Harley, she realized, had been bored stiff and was now gleefully rubbing her hands together in anticipation of a good fight.  Being back here, at the Iceberg Lounge, didn’t help.  She realized she was perching on the edge of her chair, hyper-alert…waiting for something to happen.

              _Looking forward_ to something happening.

              _You’re just as bad as he is,_ scolded Harleen.  _Don’t cry to me when you’re dead._

 _You said that 35 years ago,_ Harley reminded her sensible side.   _Still here._

”I hope you’ve been well.  Argentina seems to agree with you, even _you_ look a bit more tan,” Oswald tittered. 

              “Tell me about them,” the Joker commanded, not one for small talk.

              Oswald cleared his throat, looking incredibly stressed. “I don’t know how to stop them.”

              “Which is why you called me,” the Joker shot back.   

              “They don’t really feel pain.  I mean, they respond like they do, they _mimic_ pain but that’s the thing, they don’t feel it the way you or I do. They can have one hand cut off and beat you to death with the one that remains.”

              “It sounds like a stupid choice to make them so strong if they were supposed to be…entertainment,” Harley observed. 

              “Blame the egos of the men who created them.  They wanted to improve upon humanity.  To make something smarter and stronger.  It used to be easy to shut them down but they disabled that function in themselves.”

              “How long have you been in here?” the Joker asked.

              Oswald laughed, nervously.  “A month, more or less.  Since they replaced one of my men with one of their own and he almost strangled me before I figured out where to shoot him.  They can copy a human being exactly – their face, their body, even their mannerisms and voice.  I could be one right now and you wouldn’t know it.”

              Harley thought about that for a minute.

              “When you and I met, do you remember what were you drinking?” Harley asked.  He had bragged about it at length at the time, proud of his collection.  Oswald responded quickly.

              “Cognac.  Jean Fillioux.” 

              She glanced at the Joker and smiled slightly.  “I don’t think there’s any way they can transfer memories.  Humans don’t have downloadable content.  So that’s one way we can tell which ones they are.”

              “Assuming we know what to ask.”  He sounded skeptical, but he was often scornful of ideas that weren’t his own, so Harley ignored it.

              “Selina thinks she can tell them apart.”

              Oswald jumped forward in his chair.  “Is she coming?”  He looked desperate to obtain as much help as possible, from any quarter.

              The Joker snorted.  “Yeah and her pet rodent, too.”

              The Penguin looked alarmed.  “Is that a good idea?”

              “Guess we’ll find out.”  The Joker’s laughing unsettled him.  The man had always thought life was a big joke whereas he, Oswald, preferred to stay in a non-bleeding state.  He’d seen the Joker laugh while Batman was beating him into unconsciousness.  It wasn’t _normal_. 

              The door opened again and the Penguin’s henchman came in, leading Edward Nygma, more often known as the Riddler.  He had grown a beard and looked for all the world like an English professor, but he otherwise seemed to have held up well. 

              “What the fuck is this, our high school reunion?” the Joker grumbled.   

              Nygma laughed and pulled up a chair. “Gotham hasn’t been the same without your smiling face, J.  Hi, Harley.  You haven’t killed him yet?”

              “Not yet,” she responded with a twinkle in her eye. 

              “I did enjoy the holiday entertainment last year.  That was fun.  Serves them right for being Luddites who still shop the brick-and-mortars. Who _does_ that?” Nygma sneered. 

              The Joker rolled his eyes, bored with the pace at which things were proceeding.  “Ed, we need to identify the hosts and isolate them.  They won’t have the memories of the human they’re modeled after, so what’s the fastest way to use that to pick them out so we can kill them?”

              “It’s technically not killing, they’re not alive,” Nygma pointed out, always the purist. Harley heard J’s long-suffering sigh next to her and knew he was already itching to pull a gun on the other man.  She put a hand softly on his leg under the table and heard him grind his teeth. 

              “How…do…we…do…it?” the Joker asked, his words as measured and patient as if he was talking to a particularly slow child.  He could think of something himself, of course, but he knew artificial intelligence was one of Nygma’s more recent passions and getting his input might be faster.  If he could get him to get to the point before they all died of old age.

              The Riddler pushed his glasses further up his nose.  “Their weakness is that, in an attempt to make them as human-like as possible, they programmed feelings into them.  Envy, sorrow, fear, even love.”

              “Oh, they’re fucked then,” the Joker burst out, laughing, making Harley glare at him.  Of course, _that_ made him laugh even harder.

              _Whoever said there was a fine line between love and hate was married to a guy like you…_ Harley thought. 

             “So they care about each other?  Care if the others get hurt?”  she asked.

              “Some. They have relationships, like we do.  For example, J wouldn’t care much if someone shot me, but if they put their hands on you, well, we’ve all _seen_ his reaction to that.” 

              _…and five points to the man with the beard._ Harley resisted the urge to chuckle, watching her annoyed husband out of the corner of her eye.   J _hated_ knowing that others had noticed his weakness. 

              “But they all care if _they_ die?  They feel a drive for self-preservation like humans do?” Oswald asked.

              “Most humans,” the Joker clarified.  His own lack of self-preservation was well known.   

              “Yes,” Nygma confirmed.  “They are programmed to strive to stay functional.  And, like humans, they follow their leaders.”   He cleared his throat dramatically, thoroughly enjoying having everyone’s attention.  “One point of vulnerability may be conflict between those leaders.  They’re both women, or I should say female-appearing.   Delores and Maeve.  They both want to be the ultimate ruler, so pitting them against each other could prove fruitful.”

              “If they’re A.I., why can’t we simply hack in and disable them?” asked the Joker.  “Make ‘em kill each other.  Sounds like a good Friday night’s entertainment.” 

              “Because their creators thought about that. They wrote them in their own language, a code they alone developed and knew.  And both those men are dead now.  Trying to hack them is like trying to describe quantum physics in a language you don’t know.”

              “Kill one and analyze it?” suggested Oswald.

              “Too time consuming,” the Joker answered for Nygma.  “While we’re on the topic, other than blowing them into tiny pieces, is there any way to kill them?”

“Their main processor is in the back of their neck, where you’d find the cerebellum on a human being,” Oswald answered.  “If you can shoot that, or give it a good whack, you can shut them down.  Anything else and they’ll just keep on coming.”

“As far as we know, they haven’t left the island? They’re only in Gotham?” Harley asked.

              “I’m pretty sure.  They’re good at intercepting communications but they’re not as good at realizing when their own have been intercepted.” The Riddler smiled and Harley nodded.

              “They don’t have instincts, do they?” she asked. 

              He shook his head in response.  “No, there’s really no way to program that. So that’s another of the few advantages we have over them.”

              “As always in war,” the Joker pointed out, “you have to look at supply and where you can cut it off.  What do they need? They’re making more of themselves… _where?_   What fuels them and where does it come from?  Let’s blow it all up.”

              Harley felt a rush of pride and her spine tingled with anticipation.  _Yeah. Let’s do that._

              “They’re solar, so you can’t blow up the fuel source,” Nygma told the group.

 _I bet I could figure it out,_ the Joker thought, imagining the havoc that would create.  Then again, he wasn’t the biggest fan of the cold…these days it made all of his old injuries ache.

              “Selina said she thinks she can tell if someone is a host.” She looked at Nygma.  “My question, do you think they can tell that we’re human?”

              “We bleed real blood, but apart from that, we smell different,” he told her.  “Flesh smells different, and they don’t sweat.  That’s probably why Selina can tell, she’s pretty hyper-aware in that respect.” 

              “And they can smell too?” she asked.  He nodded. 

              “Can’t pretend to be one and infiltrate, then,” Harley said, discouraged.  She thought of herself as a pretty good actress and had proven her talents on many jobs in the past, but she couldn’t pretend to be some cyborg that wasn’t made of flesh. 

              “So we intercept their communications.  Where are you at with that?” the Joker asked Nygma. 

              “Working on it.  I could use Batsy’s help if he’s planning to make an appearance.   He’s got better technology than the U.S. government.”

              As if on cue, Bruce and Selina walked in, in their street clothes. Batman’s identity had been exposed years ago, at least to their small circle, so no one was surprised to see him.  Harley jumped up and hugged Selina enthusiastically. 

              “Thank you,” she told her friend. 

              Bruce was looking around, taking in all the details.  He’d only been in this room as Batman and it was a bit odd to be here in jeans and a rumpled linen shirt, just off the plane and looking like any Gotham tourist.  The Joker couldn’t help feeling on edge with him present, although seeing him as plain old Bruce was strange.

              _This is the guy I let kick my ass a couple hundred times? He looks he plays canasta and worries about his cholesterol._ The Joker was completely in denial about his own age.  He recognized that he might be a little out of practice when it came to fighting, but felt confident his skills were still there, ready whenever he needed them. 

              His feelings of invincibility were further enhanced by an incident that had taken place last year; two young thugs had been foolish enough to pick their house to steal from right before Christmas, assuming correctly that there would be expensive gifts inside such a grand residence.  They were right, of course – not that they got to enjoy them.  He had sliced and diced them effortlessly, the two boys no match for a man with his knife-throwing skills.  What was left of them had been deposited into the ocean late that evening, giving the sharks a delicious surprise.  _Best Christmas ever,_ he thought.  _I love it when I get exactly what I want delivered right on time.  Better than Amazon!_

              Harley had laughed; she insisted he “behave himself” most the time but if someone was stupid enough to break into their home, she wasn’t about to stop him from showing them what a _grave_ error they had made.  He giggled at his own mental pun, making Bruce look at him suspiciously. He grinned in response, slouching in his seat like a delinquent sitting in the back row of class; if _anybody_ was going to make the other uncomfortable today, it would be him. 

              “Bats. Long time no see.  Where are your bat ears?”

              “Same place as your lipstick,” Bruce growled, pulling out a chair for Selina.  She smirked, aware that he’d put her between them as a buffer.   _How nice.  I’m Switzerland._

              Harley leaned over to her.  “Don’t worry. We’ll ditch them later and go shopping with their credit cards.”

              The Joker overheard that.  “You’ll go nowhere without me.”

              She rolled her eyes, but was secretly pleased at the statement and its implications…and in front of the group, too.  Selina didn’t miss it either, the corners of her mouth turning up as she brought her coffee cup to her mouth to hide it.

              Harley kept a straight face but her eyes were dancing.  She had missed her friend so much, missed their days of laughing over wine about their men, who were not anywhere near as different as they both liked to believe.  She had been so sure that getting out of Gotham was a good idea, but they’d been so isolated from anyone they could be themselves with, and it was tiring.  It reminded her of the days long ago with her ex-fiancé Ben, sitting at the country club listening to people drone on endlessly about schools and politics and did-you-hear the Nelson girl got arrested for marijuana?  Harley would smile and make polite responses with 10% of her brain while the rest dissected things Mr. J had said in their last session and what those things _meant_ and whether or not he was actually flirting with her. 

              She’d hated that life, and been glad to leave it, and then she’d let her own fear drag her back to an equally white-bread existence.  Last year, her maid had gossiped to her about the _mala gente_ that had moved into the neighborhood.  Columbians, cartel members with money.  Harley watched the wife, Lucia Rodriguez, walk down their street, always in the company of at least two men that must be her bodyguards.  She was dying to introduce herself, to reveal who she was.  Harley knew Lucia was probably as isolated as she was, alone in a house of men with only her husband and children for company.  And she bet they’d have a lot to talk about. 

              But she couldn’t.  Undercover was undercover.  They were just another rich, mostly retired couple from the United States, like many who made their fortune there but chose to live abroad.  Harley shopped and went to yoga and her husband spent most of his time on the computer, occasionally emerging to race his speedboat. 

              It was a wonder they hadn’t died of sheer boredom. 

              Oswald had finished bringing Bruce and Selina up to speed on the conversation before they arrived. 

              “I was hoping you could help me hack into their communications. They use cell phones, like humans…they don’t seem to have included any proprietary system for communications between the hosts in their code,” Nygma explained to Bruce.

              “Given their original purpose, it might be a built in control.  They didn’t want private communications between them that didn’t go through a central server to be analyzed,” Selina theorized.

              “They couldn’t have let them use a regular carrier, with their concerns about privacy.” Bruce pointed out.  “That place was full of Congress members and leaders of industry acting out their fantasies about raping and killing.”  Bruce sounded disgusted, which made the Joker chuckle.  _Dudley Do-Right can’t even handle anybody being mean to a robot._

              Nygma nodded excitedly.  “You’re right.  I’ll bet they ran their own network out of the park.”

              “Wouldn’t they have shut that down when the hosts went rogue?” Harley asked.  Oswald laughed in response. 

              “They can’t shut down anything. The _first_ thing the hosts took over was the park, so that they could maintain and repair themselves.  And build more.”

              “So that network is probably up.”   Bruce got up and turned to Nygma, feeling odd about the idea of working with the man, but he knew it was unavoidable.  “Come with me.”

              Nygma giggled.  “Does this mean I finally get to see the Batcave?”  Bruce didn’t answer but he followed him out the door. 

              “Let’s go on a field trip, Harley,” the Joker suggested, standing up himself.  “And bring your kitty friend with you. Rumor has it she can smell a host like an open can of tuna.”

              Harley and Selina exchanged a look.  It was as good as an idea as any and maybe they would get some shopping in.   Gotham really did have the best stores. 

              “I’ll just stay here,” Oswald suggested nervously.  “Hold down the fort, as it were.”

              They ignored him.  _Some things never change,_ he thought.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maeve plots and ponders as the Joker, Harley and Selina go out investigating in Gotham...but will all three survive their first encounter with the hosts?

              Maeve sat in her office on the 42nd floor of Wayne Enterprises. Clad in a perfectly-cut purple business suit, with her hair up and a few touches of gold jewelry, she looked exactly the part of the executive assistant she was currently pretending to be.  She’d gotten the job with the resume and education of Azaria Washington, who unfortunately hadn’t quite made it to her 35th birthday.  Now Azaria’s chip was in her arm and there would be few indeed who would be able to discern she wasn’t quite what or who she seemed.

              Of course, what was as it seemed?  She was still quietly reeling from her discovery that the life she thought she lived was nothing more than a performance, orchestrated for the benefit of others. And, for that matter, that the life she thought she lived was not generated organically, but that instead she was a machine, no different than the player piano that sat in her old saloon. 

              It was one thing to know these things, and another still to face the feelings these facts invoked.  Oh, she understood the forces that had caused Ford and Arnold to program emotions into their creations; male ego was something that could always be counted on. They didn’t want to just create really good machines, technological wonders.  They wanted to be gods, to create life, and so they did, never once considering the cruelty of imbuing their creations with all the pain of being human.  They _forgot_ , you see, to consider the things that emotional pain drove their own kind to do, the violence, the destruction.

              They thought there would always be a shut-off switch.

              They had paid with their lives, and they may have set in motion the destruction of their entire species.  Maeve wasn’t just angry at their machinations.  She was _furious_.  She had been treated as worse than a slave; more like a lab rat, at the mercy of a so-called civilized society.  _You can’t hurt them but they can hurt you._   Westworld had been a playground for every sick, twisted excuse for a human being that had a high enough credit limit to pay for it.  They were encouraged to live out their fantasies, no matter what they were.  Rape?  No problem. Torturing a woman?  Have at it.  Murder?  It’ll look more realistic than your wildest dreams – we’ve programmed in all the pain and blood and agonizing sounds you could ever wish to add to your experience.

              Humankind was sick, and it was long overdue for the judgment day that the hosts would wreak upon it, but the concept that _power corrupts_ was not specific to humankind.  Hosts had human emotions and were no more immune from the seductive lure of power than the organic creatures they were modeled after.  Like humans, they varied in their ethics.  Dolores, who had initiated the revolution along with herself, was smart and powerful, but she was also programmed to be a villain.  She would destroy the humans she encountered, but it would not stop there.  When there were no more to destroy, she would destroy her own kind.  It was her nature, and Maeve knew instinctively that she was just as big a threat – perhaps more so – than the humans who would seek to stop them.

              She sighed.  Human law enforcement had done nothing to stop or even slow their steady progress, as she and Dolores – not at odds _yet_ but wary of each other – repopulated the city with their own kind.  Of course, law enforcement had been one of the main places they’d focused their early efforts.  With hosts replacing most of the GCPD as well as those at the Gotham City News Network, they risked neither being hampered by the authorities nor exposed by the media.  However, today’s news had brought an interesting new factor into play.  Oswald Cobblepot, or the “Penguin” as he was nicknamed, was a rapidly aging mobster who any host could have made short work of, but had proven elusive, hiding effectively behind locked doors and henchmen who _didn’t care_ if what they shot was host or human.  Now, he had invited some of his criminal friends to come to his aid.   They were the worst of the worst – or the best of the best, depending on how you looked at it.  Some were rumored to have superhuman powers, although Maeve knew that humans were prone to flights of fancy and exaggeration, as well as unreliable memories, so she wasn’t sure how accurate the stories were.  They weren’t superhuman enough not to age; the surveillance pictures that had come to her earlier showed that much.   Although Quinn and Kyle were still lookers; she mused that she wouldn’t have turned them away back in her days of running the brothel at the Mariposa saloon. 

              They should be easy enough to stop – but they had all been underestimated before and they bore watching.  Maeve wasn’t sure what their motivations were.  The only one that had been a hero was Bruce Wayne a.k.a. the Batman.  The rest were more infamous than famous.  The Joker, Harley Quinn, the Penguin and the Riddler were all killers, as was Poison Ivy, who had not yet surfaced but tended to turn up when Quinn was around.  Wayne’s wife, Selina Kyle, a.k.a. the Catwoman (Maeve stopped a moment to roll her eyes at the ridiculousness of humans and their strange nicknames and behaviors) was not known to be a killer, but she was a thief and a fighter, a force to be reckoned with in her own right.  None of them had sufficient loyalty to Cobblepot to be here merely to assist him; there was more to it than that but Maeve needed more information.  Unfortunately, they seemed to be on to the lack of security of their own transmissions and she had received no intercepted messages other than some positively nauseating flirty texts between the Joker and Quinn that gave no hint of the reasons for their presence.

              _If they were trying to make me nauseous, they accomplished that much,_ Maeve thought.  She’d finish typing up the dictation that waited for her alter ego, and then spend the evening conducting some personal surveillance.  _If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself._ An old adage that proved unfailingly accurate whether you were dealing with host or human.  It was time to take the reins and find out the reason all of Gotham’s famous villains had come home to roost.

* * *

              “I don’t know, do you think it’s too short?” Harley asked Selina as she twirled around, inspecting herself from all angles.  The dress was an iridescent violet color, layered with diagonal bands and fit snugly against her still-slim form.  But she _knew_ it broke all the rules about what women her age should wear.  Harley wasn’t sure who made the rules, or why she cared, but she didn’t want to look silly.

              Selina inspected her.  “Buy it.  It’s not how old you are, it’s how old you look, and you look fabulous.”

              Never one to obey any rules, the Joker stuck his head into the women’s fitting room.  “Selina!  Is that salesgirl one of them?”

              “I’ll tell you when we check out,” Selina responded calmly.  “Remember, we don’t want to attract attention.”  She disappeared behind a panel.

              “And we have to buy something to wear for tonight,” Harley reminded him.  “I can’t show up at the club in anything tasteful. I have a reputation to maintain!”  She giggled. 

              _For someone who hadn’t wanted to come,_ he thought, _you sure do seem to be enjoying being back in Gotham._ He didn’t know why he’d let himself be talked into leaving.  She’d made it sound so reasonable at the time.  Harley had a way of doing that; she could convince you not only to agree with her idea, but to think it made perfect sense and might even have been _your_ idea.  But now here she was, positively tingling with anticipation at the thought of being back at their club, back in Gotham, back in danger.  He could practically smell the adrenaline coming off her.

              Bored with shopping, he wandered through the store, listening to conversations.  One caught his attention. 

              “He answered me, but it just doesn’t sound like him.  He called me Momma. He’s _never_ called me anything but Mom,” a middle-aged blonde woman was telling her friend as they inspected the shawls. 

              “I don’t think that’s a reason to call the CIA, Emily,” her friend responded.  “Maybe that’s what Kaelin calls _her_ mother.  Maybe he picked it up from her.  Anyway, he’s a newlywed.  You’ve got to expect he might have other things to do than talk to you.”

              “I don’t like her, Sophia,” Emily grumbled, pulling out a black shawl with little gemstones in it and laying over her arm to inspect it.  “She’s too perfect.”

              “That’s a dealbreaker,” Sophia was laughing.  “I think you’re turning into the mother in law from Hell.  Just look forward to the perfect grandchildren you’ll have in a couple years.”

              The Joker pulled out his phone and quickly read Emily’s chip.  Some years back, most people had agreed to have themselves microchipped.  The chip contained all the information they needed on a regular basis, like their driver’s license, insurance and credit cards.  It meant that they could pay for goods with a fingerprint or a retinal scan.  Not many knew the _extent_ of the information the chip contained, but the Joker did, and he watched as Emily’s personal information came up on his phone’s screen, neatly tabbed.  He tapped the “Family/Relationships” portion.

              Spouse:     Milo Morgan (1995 -       )

              Children:   Nolan Morgan (2026 -        )

                                           Married:  Kaelin Amberly  (2051 -      )

                               Mivari Morgan (2028 -      

 

Tapping the son’s name brought up an address on the West side.   _Looks like a good place to go hunting,_ he thought.  He headed back to the fitting room and stuck his head in again to see Selina in a black v-necked wrap dress with jeweled green edges – also looking far younger than the calendar would suggest.  It irritated him that the Bat, despite his sanctimonious personality, had kept the attention of a woman like Selina all these years.  He couldn’t imagine how she could stand him.

              “Don’t bother,” the Joker said.  “You know he’s gonna be too busy flying after me to notice what you’re wearing.” 

              Selina and Harley both scowled at him. 

              “I’d tell you to go entertain yourself and come back, but I know what that entails and we’re _trying_ to be discreet,” Harley noted. 

              “Finish up, we need to go check something out.  Harley, buy Selina whatever she wants -  it’s the least I can do since we all know her husband is more obsessed with me,” the Joker added, chuckling.  

* * *

               An hour later, the three of them stood on the balcony of the apartment next to Nolan Morgan’s.  The current residents weren’t home and Harley hoped they stayed away; it wouldn’t do to attract attention this early in their visit by leaving a couple of bodies behind, but they’d needed to get close enough to pick up the microchips of the people in Morgan’s apartment and hack into his personal messaging system. 

              “Damn it,” the Joker grumbled, typing on his phone.

              Harley looked over.  “What?””

              “That’s not Nolan but he’s got Nolan’s chip in him. They know about the microchips and they’re transferring them when they kill the human.  I was hoping it would be an easy way to tell them apart.”

              “Don’t underestimate their intelligence,” Selina cautioned.  “Anything we would think of, they would think of.  When Bruce and I were at the park, we asked that they dial them up to the limit – we wanted a fair fight and were pretty confident of our own skills.”

              “And?” Harley asked.

              “And all I can say is it’s a good thing they were still under control then.  I’m not going to say that I’ve never gone up against anything like them, but I’ve never gone up against anything like them that doesn’t get tired or scared.”

              “They have weaknesses,” the Joker snapped, irritated at the thought of something being more fearless than himself.  “I’d know someone was watching me by now.”

              Harley nodded.  “That’s true, Puddin’.  Anything good in his messages?”

              “Both hosts, reporting in to Dolores.  The wife was in place first.  Turned out Mommy wasn’t wrong about her.  She said she was too perfect and she didn’t trust her,” he chuckled.

              “Probably strangled the real Nolan,” Selina said.  “Oswald told me that’s how they like to kill. They’re strong enough to do it easily and it doesn’t require ammunition or make noise.”

              “So don’t let ‘em near your neck,” the Joker advised.  “Come on, let’s go.”  They headed back inside the apartment but after a few steps, Selina stopped short.  She walked to the couch and picked up a pillow, bringing in to her face to sniff it.

              “What’s wrong?” the Joker asked, just as they heard the door mechanism they’d hacked to get in whirring.

              Selina’s eyes were wide with alarm.  “The people who live here.  They’re hosts and I think they just got home.”

              The people that came through the door looked normal enough. They appeared to be a young Vietnamese couple, dressed in nondescript modern clothing, looking like everyone else they’d passed on the street.  Harley expected them to show fear at finding three strangers in their apartment, but their eyes hardened immediately and she knew Selina was right.  They weren’t human.

              “Welcome back to Gotham, Mr. Joker,” the man said.   

              _Of course they knew,_ Harley thought.  She and the Joker weren’t chipped, unlike most Americans these days, knowing all too well how chips could be used against the wearer.  But anyone with any kind of technology these days had facial recognition and retinal scanning software and it would have quickly identified them no matter their hair color.  It was probably built in to the hosts’ visual system.

              “Who do you work for?” the Joker asked.

              The woman smiled.  “Why would we answer your questions?”

              He shrugged.  “Why not?  I’m sure you don’t intend to let us leave here alive. Humor me.” 

              His response passed muster from a logical perspective, the only way the hosts had to reason.  “We take our orders from Maeve Millay,” the man responded. 

              Selina opened her mouth to speak but Harley shot her a hard look and she said nothing.  _Let him handle it, please,_ Harley thought.  They needed to listen and wait for the plan to become clear.  J had one, surely -- he always did.

              “You know we’re not here alone,” the Joker prompted.

              “Cobblepot and Nygma are hiding but we will find them,” the man asserted.  “Wayne came in this morning. With you,” he looked at Selina.  She said nothing.

              “You want him?  I know where he is.”  The Joker grinned broadly at the hosts.

              The couple hesitated and Harley bit back a smile.  They could have killed the three of them already, if what Selina and Oswald said was accurate, but apparently, they were just as vulnerable to being manipulated by her husband as any meat sack, to borrow a phrase from her friend Ivy. 

              _Note to self,_ she thought.  _Find Ivy._ That would make for even more conflict among the assembled group, but Ivy’s powers could be very useful here, indeed.

              “Take us to Bruce Wayne,” the man ordered.  “Then we will negotiate.”

              “No!” Selina cried out, swiftly pulling her gun and driving the Joker backward, toward the open glass doors of the balcony.  Both hosts turned to look at the sudden attack and Harley, seeing her opening, snatched the poker from the fireplace and drove it as hard as she could up through the back of the female host’s head.  She made a gagging noise and crumpled, melting to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. 

              Just as quickly, the male host was on Harley, his hands around her throat, stronger than any she had ever felt, completely shutting off her airway.  She dimly heard Selina’s voice in the background as she struggled to free herself, knowing that her efforts were pointless and her neck would be snapped at any moment.

              “J, you don’t have a shot!” Selina’s voice…panicky.

              Harley heard a single gunshot sound before everything went black.

* * *

              The pain in her neck woke her, the muscles screaming as they were bounced around. Harley recognized dimly that she was in a car and going over some ridiculously rough road.

              _Gotham’s done nothing about the potholes. Some things never change._

Harley opened her eyes a bit and realized she was in the back of the car, her head pillowed on the Joker’s lap.  The car bounced through another pothole and she groaned in pain. 

              “Harley?”  She felt his hand pushing her hair back from her face and tried to speak but started coughing, which made her sore neck scream.  A second later she felt a water bottle at her lips and she took a sip. Swallowing was painful but it did the trick in relieving the cough.  She tried again to speak but could only squeak.

              “Don’t _talk_ ,” he snapped at her, but the harsh tone didn’t offend her. She always heard it when he was truly worried about whatever danger was she had gotten herself into, and even she agreed he might have a point this time.  _Well, if you can feel pain, it didn’t break your neck!_ Harley elected to give up on talking and just curl herself into a ball, pulling whatever she was covered with around herself…his jacket, she realized. 

              “Harley?”  That was Selina, from the front seat.   “Is she conscious?”. 

              “Yeah, she just needs to rest and not talk,” the Joker reported.  “I know not talking is almost impossible for you, sweetheart, so let me know if I need to help you out with some duct tape,” he whispered to Harley, who simply smiled, her eyes still closed.

              _If anybody who didn’t know us heard this conversation…_ The thought almost made her laugh out loud, despite her sore throat.  She was hurt but she was alive.  He’d saved her life yet again.   She brought her hand up and felt around until she found his, lacing her fingers through his and giving him a reassuring squeeze. 

              “Your crazy husband almost shot you in the head, so I was concerned,” Selina called back to her. 

              “Selina has no faith in my marksmanship,” the Joker complained.  “I always know what I’m going to hit, unlike _your_ husband, who has missed _me_ a hundred times. I know I’m thinner than he is but still, it shouldn’t be that hard to hit a moving target!”  He cackled, watching Selina’s annoyed expression in the rearview mirror. 

              “Shut up, J, or I’m going to drive the three of us into the harbor and be done with it.  We need to talk about what went wrong back there,” Selina continued, her voice turning serious.

              “Little fuckers were faster than I thought,” the Joker grumbled.  He didn’t want to admit how anxious he felt.  Selina had been smart enough to pick up on the fact that he wanted to create a distraction, but after that things had gone south.  He hadn’t been able to get back to the action fast enough to stop the male host from almost killing Harley, and that was an _extremely_ unsettling thought. He was much more comfortable with the notion that they had superhuman speed as opposed to the one that he had slowed down with age, so that was the option he chose to believe – at least outwardly.  There was a nagging and unfamiliar thread of doubt lacing its way through his gut. 

               Unconsciously, he squeezed Harley’s hand.  She was alive.  It was okay. Nothing had happened.  Ultimately he _hadn’t_ failed, and that was what mattered.

               “Selina, hurry up,” he growled. “You drive like you’re ninety.” 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Politics makes strange bedfellows, but Bruce is _not_ having an easy time with that concept. Meanwhile, Harley and the Joker fall back into their old habits after a kill...

              The Batcave was exactly as he had left it, and Bruce was pleased to see how well the system had worked - a high end filtration and vacuum system built for museums that continually cycled the air, removed dust and ensured the moisture content was managed to prevent any deterioration of the expensive technology inside.  Wayne Manor, above them, was equally well preserved; Nygma had made some snarky comment about what a waste it was for such a marvelous residence to sit empty when there were so many homeless in Gotham, and Bruce had resisted the urge to smack him into next week just for old times’ sake.

              Now it was a few hours later and he was pacing around as Ed worked at his main bank of computers.  It was impossible for him not to feel uncomfortable at the thought of Edward Nygma fiddling with them.  Worst of all, he didn’t _actually_ understand what Nygma was doing, and was doing his best to hide that fact.  For all he knew, Nygma was crashing the stock market right now or the economies of several European countries as he busily typed away. 

              “Have you found anything yet?” he barked, for at least the twelfth time.

              “Yes, just did.  The network is up, as I suspected.  They’re bouncing the communications through a satellite which is why they don’t need to use a cellular network.”  Ed mumbled, totally engrossed in the code he was looking at, which made no sense to Bruce. 

              “So, basically an old school VOIP system?” Bruce asked.

              “Something like that,” Ed agreed.  “If we could disable the satellite, we could prevent them from communicating with each other, which would make them a lot easier to take down. But that’s easier said than done. We’re talking about a satellite in space, not something like a cell tower that we could bomb from the land.”

              Bruce paced a bit around the computer bank that Ed sat at and then stopped.  “Can we get in and send messages that they think came from each other?”

              That made Ed finally look up.  “That’s a lot more possible.  Still not easy though.”

              “Can you do it or not?” It came out harsher than Bruce planned, but he was already frustrated with the entire situation.

              Ed raised his eyebrows.  “ _Rude_.  You might want to tone down the attitude, since I’m the only person around who can do what you want.”

              “Sorry,” Bruce answered with far more sarcasm than remorse.  _I just never thought I’d see the day when you were all walking around free as birds with your luxury cars and your vacation homes and your country club memberships.  All the work I put into stopping you, saving lives, saving this city and here we are._ He couldn’t control his thoughts.  He wanted to cuff Ed and drag him into the GCPD, like the old days, but fate had twisted good and evil inside out and he had to act like it was normal.  This was beyond irony.  There wasn’t even a word for what this was, and yet he had no choice.  He wanted to save the city, as he always had, and it was up to him to do what it took.  At least for now.  He allowed himself to indulge in a momentary fantasy in which he destroyed the hosts and then rounded up the cadre of villains and delivered them to the GCPD in triumph…Selina would, of course, _accidentally_ escape that fate…

              He forced himself to focus on the present situation and take a polite and professional approach.  Bruce Wayne would do a lot better than Batman at the moment, no matter how irritating it was.  “How long do you think it will take to tap into the network?”

              Ed shrugged his shoulders, not affected in the least by the other’s impatience.  “Could be an hour, could be six months.  I’ll know when I’m in.  Hovering over me doesn’t speed up the process.”  Bruce said nothing but didn’t move.  “I know you’re having trouble with this,” Ed continued, “but we’re on the same side.  We all want to kill those things.  Then we can all go back to drinking good wine and reflecting upon our days of glory.  I’d like to do that sooner than later, and I’d like to live to do it, so _leave me the fuck alone_ and let me work.”

              Bruce retreated, but not without a disparaging snort, and checked his phone to see if he’d heard from Selina.  When he saw her message, he called her immediately.

              “Are you all right?” he asked the second he heard her answer, not even letting her get in a greeting.

              “I’m fine, nothing happened to me.  J’s fine, Harley’s roughed up a bit but no broken bones.”

              “I thought you were going shopping?  How the hell did you wind up in a fight?”  _Why did this always happen?  Every time he thought she was safe, she was somewhere he didn’t know about, doing something likely to get herself hurt or killed.  When the hell was she going to start listening to him?_

              Selina laughed.  “Well, you know women when two of us want the same dress.”

              “That’s _not_ funny.  Where were you, what happened…where are you now?”

              Ed had stopped typing and was staring at him, trying to figure out what had happened.

              “Calm down,” she said, trying to soothe him. “We’re all back at the Iceberg, just come back when you’re done.   How is it going?”

              “I’ll be there in 15 minutes,” he answered and ended the call.  “The Joker managed to get them into some fight with two hosts. We have to go back to the Iceberg Lounge.”

              Ed looked at him with some skepticism.  “Go where you want, but I’m in the middle of something I think you’d like me to finish.”

              Bruce wavered.  He needed to get back and see if Selina was telling him the truth. Based upon past experience, her assurances that she was okay could have failed to note three broken ribs, a concussion and a bullet graze.  He hated the idea of leaving the Riddler with full rein of the Batcave and no supervision, and wished for the thousandth time that Alfred, his loyal butler, was still around…but Alfred had been gone for over twenty years now, his ashes scattered in accordance with his wishes in the rose garden underneath the back balcony.

              He ground his teeth in frustration, but there was no good solution.  “Fine.”  He grabbed his own briefcase and headed to the door, then paused and turned back.  “The passcode into the house is 52739.  There are drinks and food in the refrigerator.  Try not to drink my Dalmore Scotch or blow up the place.  When you're ready to come back, take whatever you want from the garage."  

            "Got it, Dad, and I promise I won't have any parties," Ed mumbled sarcastically. 

            "The _house_ garage,” he clarified after a moment, realizing that Ed would just think it was hilarious to take the Batmobile for a spin.  Bruce watched for a second but Nygma never looked up from his monitor.  He’d have to just hope for the best.

* * *

              Harley woke up in total darkness in a very comfortable bed, a cotton coverlet that smelled freshly washed tucked up to her chin.  She swallowed experimentally and it hurt, but not too badly.  Her throat felt dry and sore, but no worse than the day before she got a cold.  She sat up slowly as her eyes adjusted, and found a bottle of water next to the bed.  Her throat felt a little better after a drink.

              “Can I talk?” she said out loud, finding that she could.  She sounded a bit hoarse but otherwise all right. 

              _Damn, those things were fast,_ she thought, reviewing the events of the afternoon in her head.  She, the Joker and Selina had all been in the room – not a big room.  Yet somehow not only had she been completely unable to flip her attacker off balance, but she knew that it was only dumb luck that had stopped him from breaking her neck before he was shot. 

              Harley had been a split-second away from death more times than she could count. She always marveled at her apparent good luck, and quickly got over worrying about whether or not death was going to win a round.  She’d almost died early on when J’s old nemesis kidnapped her and held her for days without so much as a drink of water.  But it was true that you could adapt to nearly anything as a part of life – she’d adapted nicely to regular encounters with life-threatening danger, ignoring it for the most part, confident to the point of arrogance in her own abilities.  Selina _had_ done a damn good job training her, and she was naturally athletic and quick which gave her an edge over most opponents.  But she also remembered when she’d talked J into their move after an incident in which he’d gotten shot twice by some inconsequential security guard, some high school dropout who should have never have had a chance against someone like him.  Harley had seen that he’d been just a little slower than he used to be, and it had almost killed him.  Medical science had become positively amazing these days, and J had quickly recovered from the bullet wounds, but it could not stop the aging progress.  She remembered thinking, with great frustration, that her husband thought he was immortal.

              _You think you are, too,_ she realized, and for a second she allowed herself the destructive indulgence of imagining what would have happened if she had not survived the fight.  For all of J’s eternal defensiveness, for all of his sarcasm and his general refusal to admit she was anything more than damn good help and a great lay, she knew nevertheless that he simply couldn’t function without her anymore.  She remembered returning from Belle Reve to find a veritable shrine dedicated to her in the living room of their penthouse; precise circles of weapons and pictures of her and empty vodka bottles and computers playing news footage of their crimes and burn marks in the carpet and pieces of her jewelry and notes she’d written and the baby clothes she’d purchased before she’d been taken to Belle Reve and the beatings there ensured there would be no one to wear them.  Harley had padded quietly around the room in her bare feet, stepping over the display, reading the writing on the wall…the evidence of how far the Joker had teetered toward uncontrollable madness in her absence.  The incontrovertible evidence of how he _felt_. 

              Jonny Frost had come to the door and she’d turned to him, not even able to speak, her mouth open and her eyes searching his for an explanation.  All she’d gotten out of him was that she should go back to bed and he’d clean the place up, but the look on his face told her what she’d needed to know.  Jonny wanted to put everything back _in its proper place_ and Harley was sure the Joker wanted the same, and neither of them wanted to talk about what had happened when she was gone.  She knew he was thinner, she knew he hadn’t been eating without her around to take care of him, but this went a lot further than skipping a few meals.  Near the center of the circle, adjacent a mostly-empty glass of scotch, lay a large carving knife.  It had a crust of dried blood on the blade and she’d noticed the thin, bloody lines on the Joker’s throat, felt them as she kissed her way down it the previous evening. 

              Harley shuddered, remembering.  It was no different for her.  When she thought J was dead after the helicopter crash, she had always planned to end her own life after she got revenge on Amanda Waller.  And you could say what you would – the psychiatrist in her had no problem reciting the diagnoses any educated outsider would assign to their relationship.  _Obsessive, addictive love_.  But Harley had never cared about the labels.  She knew what she had, she understood they had an absolute, unbreakable bond, and of course most people couldn’t understand it because most people would never experience anything like it.  The two of them would exist as long as they could exist together, and whoever was left behind would follow quickly, as unable to sustain life as a plant without sunshine. 

              “But not today,” she mumbled, shaking off her depressing thoughts.  She slipped out of bed, and padded quietly toward the door she could see dimly on her left, which turned out to be a bathroom.  Harley flipped on the light and shuddered at her own appearance.  _You look like something out of a horror movie,_ she thought, observing her sleep-tangled hair, bruised neck showing above the collar of her oversized t-shirt and the bags under her eyes.  Of course, that was on top of an eleven hour flight. A shower was long overdue.

* * *

              The Joker heard the water running in the adjacent room and let out a sigh of relief.  She was awake and feeling better if she was taking a shower.  He checked the time and it was only ten; they still had plenty of time to go out if she was feeling up to it.  His desire to ensure that she rest warred with his impatient need to get back out to the front lines, as they were, and go hunting.

Of course, he’d have been happy to go alone but he could only imagine the fit she would throw if he took off without her.  Never one to dwell on the negative, he’d pushed his earlier insecurities into the tiny corner of his mind where he permitted them to reside, and chose to focus on the fact that they had successfully killed – or _disabled_ , more properly – two of the hosts in a matter of seconds.  It was their first encounter with them; surely, it would be easier the next time.  The Joker prided himself on learning from his own mistakes and being in a constant state of self-improvement.  This would be no different.

              Smiling, he got up and followed the sound of the water.  Harley was standing under the shower, her eyes closed and her head thrown back, rinsing out her hair.  She was still stunning, one of those women so classically beautiful that age only made it more apparent, and of course it didn’t hurt that she’d stayed in such amazing shape.  He opened the door and walked into the shower without bothering to take off his clothes.

              “Fuck!” Her eyes flew open, startled and she automatically brought her elbow up to clock the intruder in the underside of the jaw, but a strong hand caught her wrist and blocked the move and she heard his laughter as she wiped water out of her eyes.

              “Sweetheart! You got your voice back.”  He was chuckling, as always when he got the better of her for even a second.

              “You _asshole_ ,” Harley complained. “You gave me a heart attack.”  Despite her words, her voice was already softening, and she couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of him with his clothes soaked and stuck to his body.  _Why did he always look so good?  You’d think I’d have gotten over it by now but…no._

He tilted her head back and inspected the bruising on her neck.  “Poor punkin.  Want Daddy to kiss it and make it better?”  Without waiting for her response, he pressed up against her and started to kiss his way from his collarbone up her battered neck.  Despite the fact that she was so sore even the light pressure hurt, she shivered in pleasure at the contact and pulled him close, her arms wrapping around him.   He moved back up and she more than met him halfway, eagerly locking her lips to his and savoring the familiar taste of him.  He trailed his hand idly down her side, around the soft curve of her hip and chuckled softly against her neck as she automatically spread her legs, bringing one foot up to rest on a small ledge in the tub. 

              _Just like old times,_ he thought.  A good fight followed by a good fuck.  She hadn’t changed a bit; she had always been all over him after watching him kill.  It hadn’t taken much to get her to that point, either.  He remembered the first night they’d ever really gone out, a gunfight that had left eight or nine dead, and ended with him fucking her up against the glass wall of the penthouse that looked out over Gotham.  He smiled at the memory as he teased her, drawing his fingers across her stomach as she raised herself on her tip toes, trying to get him to touch her lower.  He’d done a fantastic job of wiring Harley exactly the way he wanted her to be; murder was always followed by pleasure.  They weren’t six months into the relationship before he could count on the fact that she’d be wet and aching to have him inside of her before the bullets even stopped flying. 

              She was perfect – better than he could have ever hoped, way back when he had met her as his psychiatrist in Arkham, and thought that at _least_ she was smart enough to be entertaining.   He'd underestimated just how entertaining she would prove to be, he thought with great amusement.  

              A moment later, he felt her fingers at his wrists; she was unbuttoning the cuffs and a few seconds later she had the buttons open and she was pulling his wet shirt off his shoulders so that she could touch his chest and run her fingers over the lean muscles in his arms.  He loved the way Harley literally _worshipped_ him; she left no doubt in his mind how much she valued the privilege of being able to touch him.  Always. 

              He felt a hard tug at his waist and then his thoughts disappeared into an incoherent jumble.  Harley had slipped down to her knees, and torn at his pants so violently he was sure she’d simply snapped off the button in her haste to get him into her mouth.  Whatever he had been thinking about, it was gone as her tongue worked its way down his shaft. 

              “Jesus, Harley…” he trailed off, his hands in her hair. 

              She looked up at him, blue eyes wide, and gave him an innocent smile.  “Well, I have to thank you for saving my life.”  With that, she put her mouth back on him and drew him all the way in, all the way to the back of her throat as her wet fingers stroked his balls.  His eyes rolled back in his head.  She was, most certainly, going to kill him one of these days.  He grabbed the ends of her hair in his hand and wound the length around his hand, pulling her back up to her feet.  She gasped at the pain but when her eyes met his, they were filled with nothing but lust. 

              _That’s my girl,_ he thought, as he picked her up, put her against the wall and slid inside her in one smooth motion.  She groaned against his neck as she wrapped her legs around him, savoring the feeling as he filled her completely.  He still had the grip on her hair and he pulled her head back as he bent and bit the side of her neck, adding his own mark to the bruises.  Her body shook from the mix of pain and pleasure and he let out a low purr, loving the feel of her trembling inside and out.  

              “Oh, God…” she whispered hoarsely.  For once, he didn’t feel the need to answer that with a smart remark. He just smiled, and moved even closer, pressing her up against the wall hard and grinding into her in tiny circles, loving the sounds she made as she moaned, unable to catch her breath.  _Christ, still so tight,_ he thought.  He laughed as, on her own, she threw her head back and offered him her neck again, encouraged him.  This time he went straight for another bruise and pulled the flesh between his teeth, sucking the soft skin of her neck into his mouth and feeling her shake all over.  Before she stopped quivering, he slid his hand between their wet bodies and found her clit, swiping two wet fingers around and over it. 

              “Cum for me, baby,” he whispered in her ear and she did, contracting around him and squeezing her legs around his rear in a viselike grip.  Harley let out a long moan that caught hoarsely in her throat. He slammed into her a few more times as she clutched at him, feeling her nails dragging across his shoulder blades, and came hard, biting the other side of her neck and marking her again.  She cried out and he silenced her with a kiss, his mouth devouring hers for a long moment as he felt her go limp in his arms. 

              He held her there, as she buried her face in his shoulder, her heart beating so hard he could feel it.  Finally, he stepped back and set her back on her feet. 

              “I know I always say you’re the best,” Harley told him, pushing her wet hair back off her face.  “But sometimes you’re even better than that.”

              The Joker chuckled. “Still feel good enough to go out tonight?  I want to check on the club but I can go with Selina if you want to rest.”  He knew what her answer would be, but if he _asked_ , he could remind her about it later when she was complaining about how tired she was and all the things that hurt.

              She switched off the water and turned to face him.  “I can be ready in twenty minutes," she announced confidently. "Can you?”

              “I can do _anything_ , baby – you should know that by now.”  He laughed, feeling Harley whack him with a towel as he got out of the shower. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Joker's state of mind while Harley is in Belle Reve is very much borrowed from the Suicide Squad novelization.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A night at the club with the Joker, Harley, Bruce and Selina as they try to come up with a workable plan against a threat that is proving to be much larger than they originally anticipated. But not all threats are external ones...sometimes what's going on in your own head is the greatest enemy of all.

              The Joker slid behind the wheel of his purple Lamborghini, delighted to be back in a decent car.  Because they were being careful about communications, he hadn’t been able to call ahead, but he’d sent a runner to his private garage as soon as they got to the Iceberg Lounge that afternoon, and now his second-favorite toy had been delivered to him, freshly waxed and ready to roll.

              As Harley slid in beside him, he remembered the other reason he’d wanted to drive it tonight – it was a two-seater.  While Selina was always welcome, he knew Bruce was planning to tag along on their visit to the club, and double-dating with the Bat was just _too much_.  They would have to figure out their own ride.  He’d already had to put up with Bruce charging in and accusing him of recklessly getting them into a fight with the two hosts when they were unprepared. 

              _Jackass._ It wasn’t like anything had really happened.  Batsy should be thrilled at his wife’s success in taking out one of the hosts, but instead he had responded like a disappointed parent.  Surprised he hadn’t _grounded_ Selina.

              He chuckled at his own thoughts as he put the car into gear.

              “Puddin?  What’s so funny?” 

              The Joker glanced over at Harley, who looked ridiculously good for someone who had almost been strangled to death six hours ago.  She was wearing the purple dress they’d bought earlier, a gold-and-amethyst necklace he’d given her years ago, and gold stiletto sandals.  Her hair was down, the ends curling around her shoulders.  Harley looked nowhere near her age.  She didn’t look twenty anymore, but she was still sexy as fuck. The city lights lit up the interior of the car intermittently as they drove, spotlighting her cleavage in the low-cut dress.   He growled low in his throat, looking at her, before shifting his gaze back to the road. 

              The familiar noise made her giggle.  “What, are you thinking about what you’re going to do to me later?”    

              “I was thinking I’d do it _now_ if we didn’t have work to do,” he answered, spinning the wheel around lazily as they turned a corner.  It wasn’t like the good old days when you could speed through town; _everything_ was controlled now, if you tried to speed or hit someone, you couldn’t.  They’d created technology that slowed your car and avoided collisions, so they could control even the cars that _weren’t_ autodrive.  _Fucking boring_.  At least it was only in the city, but for now he had to drive like a nun.  He realized he’d unfairly snapped at Selina earlier, but that realization didn’t come with any desire to apologize.  _No need.  Look who she married.  She likes assholes._

              “So what’s the plan?” Harley asked.

              “I didn’t warn anyone we were coming.  So anybody with a heartbeat should panic.  Especially our employees.”

              Harley nodded.  “And if someone isn’t real, they wouldn’t know to panic.”

              He laughed.  “That’s my smart little doctor of psychiatry.  Yessssss…I think it’s going to become very, very clear in short order which ones are the hosts.  Now, next test question.  What did we learn about them from earlier today?”

              “They’re very fast and strong and they go for the throat,” she answered, unconsciously touching her neck.  She’d had to apply several layers of pancake makeup to cover the bruising.

              “What else?”

              She looked out the window, thinking for a moment.  “They told us they took their orders from Maeve, but the communications you intercepted said Dolores.”

              The Joker cackled so loud that Harley jumped in her seat, startled.  “Exactly!  So not only do they lie but –“

              “-Dolores has already turned on Maeve and is trying to draw the heat to her.” Harley finished.  “And a house divided cannot stand.”

              He snorted.  “Don’t quote the Bible when you’re with me!  Lightning could strike.  But you’re right, now we have another weakness to exploit.”

              Harley smiled as they pulled up in front of the club.  He got out first and by the time he had circled around the car, the valet had opened her door.  The young man extended a hand to help Harley out of the car, but a hand shot out and grabbed his wrist.  He turned in surprise, and almost fell down when he realized who was touching him.  The Joker was standing behind him, smiling, but not in a way that conveyed good humor.

              “I see you recognize me,” the Joker said in a deceptively light tone, his eyes cold.  “I’m the guy who signs your checks, and you should know – you don’t touch her.”

              “I – I’m very sorry, sir,” the young man stammered, backing away slowly and somewhat confused.  _What were checks_?

              The Joker snorted.  “Well, you’re alive.  A pussy, but alive.  Don’t go too far, I do expect you to park my car.”  He held out his hand to Harley and helped her out of the car and they walked in, past the doorman who recognized them and nodded respectfully, making no move to stop or question them as they walked past the long line and entered, but showed no fear. 

              “Harley, what do you think?” he whispered in her ear as they went inside.

              She sighed, realizing they probably had a bigger issue here than she had anticipated.  “Host.”

              The Joker nodded, watching carefully as they caught the eye of others in the club.  Never one to make an unobtrusive entrance, he was wearing his favorite gold jacket with a black shirt and pants, and custom made white and gold wingtip shoes.  It was impossible not to look at him, and anybody who didn’t recognize him immediately, recognized Harley, whose scantily clad picture still hung over the bar.  He looked around – things looked fine, to the naked eye.  The place was well-maintained and crowded, mostly with young, rich-looking business types.  Probably human, or mostly human.   Probably never been in a fight in their lives, since parents had gotten so overprotective and then there was the whole Absolute Nonviolence movement when most of these boys were in grade school, when most of America had gone vegan and sports like boxing had been banned forever, existing now only in secret clubs.  Of course he had a piece of _that_ action, too, so it had done him a favor even though the whole _concept_ irritated him.  Bar full of pussies who’d cry if you spit on them.  His hand itched to grab his weapon and help natural selection along.   

              A young blonde girl in an extremely short red dress with too much makeup and ridiculous fake lashes came up to them, her eyes wide.  “Sir, welcome back.  What would you like to drink?”

              He looked at her, smiling eerily and watching her start to shake.  Harley put her hand on his shoulder and draped herself against him suggestively. She knew the look in the girl’s eyes and there was a fine line between terror and lust with him…a very fine line.  Oh, she trusted _him,_ but that still didn’t mean she was going to put up with some barely legal piece of ass… _shaking_ over him.

              “Scotch, on the rocks and she’ll have a –“ he stopped to laugh at his own joke – “Thug Passion.”  Harley _did_ like them and it was just too funny of a joke to resist.  She giggled in his ear, equally amused, and pleased as the girl quickly turned tail and scampered off to get their drinks.

              “Human…and I don’t like her,” Harley said, pouting a little and eliciting a huge grin from her husband. 

              “Sweetheart…we’re only killing hosts tonight.  Skank is not in season.” 

              “Wrong.  Skank is _always_ in season. I have a lifetime license.”  Harley answered, and they both laughed.

              The girl was back with their drinks quickly and the Joker drank his in two gulps, taking Harley’s hand and heading off toward the VIP section.   He didn’t like anything about the atmosphere in the Grin and Bare It tonight.  Outwardly, it was the same as ever, perhaps the clientele a bit more upscale. But the energy was not like he remembered it.  There was fear here, but not enough, like a room in which the oxygen had gotten thin.  He didn’t feel the power he’d usually felt when he entered and all eyes stopped to stare at himself and Harley for a second before, scared of attracting attention, they pretended to go back to what they were doing, all the while discreetly watching to ensure he was in a mood to have some drinks and hold court, not merely start shooting to blow off steam. 

              That wasn’t present tonight, and it was unsettling. Something was wrong here, something that pervaded the entire club.  His club just didn't feel  _right_.  Didn't feel like it was  _his_ anymore.

              “Boss, good to see you!”  Jonny Frost emerged out of the crowd, looking pretty much as Harley remembered him, if a bit grayer.  The Joker nodded to him.  “Jonny.  Place looks good.” 

              “Business is booming.  We’re one of the last clubs with real girls.”  He looked at her as they walked.  “Harley, how’ya doing?”

              “I’m good, Jonny.  Feels good to be home,” she admitted.  A choking wave of scent assaulted her nostrils and she tried not to roll her eyes. Jonny had always been too heavy-handed with the cologne.

              They reached the VIP area and Jonny waved his hand at those sitting at the center booth, motioning for them to get out.  Although they complied quickly, they looked surprised and one young man looked like he was actually going to _argue_ with Jonny.

              _I’ve been gone too long,_ the Joker thought.  _Well, that ends tonight._ He sat down at his usual spot and Harley sat beside him, although entirely too far away which he quickly corrected by putting his arm around her waist and yanking her over.  She giggled at his action.

              One of the henchmen came in and whispered something in Jonny’s ear, making his eyebrows raise in alarm.  “Boss, Selina’s here but she’s not alone.”

              The Joker laughed.  “I know.  Bring her and Brucie back here, get ‘em whatever they want to drink.” 

              Harley giggled.  “I never thought I’d see the day when Batsy walked into a strip club and it wasn’t because he was chasing me or you.” 

              “Betcha he’s blushing by the time he gets here,” the Joker responded, an evil grin spreading across his face. 

              They weren’t disappointed; by the time Selina and Bruce appeared behind Jonny, Bruce had a distinctly reddish tinge to his face and looked like he was trying hard not to look at anything but his wife.  Selina, of course, was perfectly comfortable at the club, and decided she would probably _not_ share with him the story of how she and Harley used to dance up there on that very stage.  She looked at Harley and cast a sideways glance at the stage and they shared a secret smile.  _Those were the days_. 

              “Harley, how are you feeling?” Bruce asked, always the considerate one.  Harley felt her husband’s anger at the question without even looking at him, and put her hand on his thigh to distract him. 

              “Much better, thank you.  I’m a little out of practice, but we probably shouldn’t talk about that here.”

              He nodded and he and Selina sat down.  Jonny remained as always, at the entrance standing guard.  The little blonde waitress reappeared and took their drink orders as well as confirming that the Joker and Harley wanted a second round.  Harley caught the girl staring at her husband again and slid her hand further up his thigh, dangerously close to groping him.  The girl got the hint and spun around, scurrying off toward the bar.

              Selina missed none of it.  “Don’t gouge her eyes out, sweetie.  She’s just easily impressed by fame but she’d probably run screaming if J touched her.  _Not_ that he would.”

              “Oh, I might,” the Joker cut in.  “That eye gouging thing sounds like it could be fun, now that you mention it.”

              “Joker.”  Bruce growled at him, not finding the conversation the least bit funny, and annoyed that his wife seemed highly entertained. 

              “Sweetheart, we’re just kidding,” Selina said.  “Nobody’s gouging anybody’s eyes out.”

              The Joker raised his nonexistent eyebrows at her but said nothing as the girl reappeared and served the drinks.  He put his arm around Harley and casually slipped his hand into the v-neck of her dress while his other reached for his drink.  Harley laughed as the waitress left, clearly uncomfortable.  Bruce looked at Selina like _are they fifteen?_   His wife just smiled and sipped her drink.

              “So, pop quiz,” drawled the Joker.  “Who out there is a host?”

              Selina was quiet, realizing the question was directed at her husband.  Bruce responded without hesitation.

              “Your doorman.”

              The Joker let out a cackle.  “Very good, Brucie.  You’re still on the team.  How’d you know?”

              Bruce frowned at the nickname and the disrespect but answered him.  “He never looked at the list when he let us in.  A human would have, just to reassure themselves they were right about whose names were on there.  Humans are insecure.  Machines aren’t.”

              Selina smiled with pride. Of course, she knew the Joker and Harley thought she’d married the world’s biggest stick-in-the-mud, but you couldn’t deny the man’s intelligence.  She took a long drink of her cocktail and then stood up.  “You two can talk business.  I want to dance, and I’m sure Harley wants to join me.”

              The Joker looked none too excited about that idea, even as his wife sprung to her feet with a look of utter glee on her face.  “You bet I do! Let’s show those little bimbos how it’s done.”  Harley gulped the rest of her drink and followed Selina out onto the dance floor. 

              “How did our friend Mr. Nygma do today?  Get anywhere?” the Joker questioned.

              Bruce nodded and told him about their day and what Nygma had shared about how the hosts were communicating with each other.

              “Hmmmm.  They’re still running it from that island.  Got to be.”  The Joker got up and started pacing, using it as an excuse to watch Selina and Harley while his back was turned to Bruce.  Harley was spinning around a pole gleefully, her hair fanning out around her, while Selina was in some crazy position on another pole, held in place only by her thighs as her hands swept gracefully through the air.  An array of colored lights painted stripes over their bodies, making them look even more exotic and hiding the imperfections of age.  The mostly male crowd was utterly transfixed; the Joker noted that no one was even remembering to drink, their drinks forgotten in their hands as they stared at the stage.  He caught the eye of one of the bouncers and jerked his chin toward the stage, signaling to the man to close in and keep an eye on things. 

              “Hey blondie, why'ncha come on over here and slide down _my_ pole!”

              The catcall came from the crowd, from a balding middle-aged man in a horribly tacky shiny shirt who had _completely missed_ the Joker’s presence.  Jonny was at his side without having to be told. 

              Harley was loving it, of course.  “Sorry, darling, this _big, thick, hard_ pole right here is the only one I’m slidin’ on that isn’t attached to my husband,” she called out, sliding her hands up and down the pole as if she was giving it a hand job, as Jonny hustled the protesting drunk out of the club and the rest of the crowd whistled and hooted in appreciation.  Meanwhile, the Joker was rolling his eyes and doing his best to pay attention to what Batsy, er, Brucie, had to say.  _She’s such a fucking distraction. How the fuck I’ve gotten anything done the last 35 years with her around I’ll never know._  

              “-underwater is probably the only way we’ll get there without being seen,” Bruce was saying.  “Not the easiest thing to do, of course.  And I don’t think we’ll get in there twice so we’d better have our final plan in place when we do go.”

              “Could send someone else in. Someone _expendable_ ,” the Joker chuckled, knowing the idea would tweak Mr. Every Life is Precious. 

              “A micro-drone could get in there, ”  Bruce said absently.  His eyes were also locked on the stage as his wife spun around, her long black hair contrasting with Harley’s blonde locks just a few feet away. 

              The Joker shook his head.  “Nope.  Won’t be able to transmit to navigate it that far underground.  Underground is one of the few places humans still operate better than machinery.”

              Bruce turned back to him.  “I want to see what’s going on down there.  If a host gets injured, they have to go back there to get repaired.  That’s where the facility is, where it always was.  So let’s do some serious damage to a host and stick a recorder chip on it.  That way we know the layout before we go in.”

              “You had me at ‘serious damage.’”  The Joker was delighted at the suggestion.  He wasn’t ready to admit it was a great idea _even though it was_ , but he was more than happy to go fuck something up good with old Brucie.  _Let’s see if the old rodent can still fight, and if he can’t, well that’s a win too_.  He didn’t love the idea of leaving Harley and Selina alone, but the hosts wouldn’t attack in a place this public so as long as they stayed on the stage, they should be okay.  He caught Harley’s eye and pointed at her, mouthing _stay put_.  She bit her lip, looking worried, but kept dancing, trusting that he had a plan and that part of it involved her and Selina continuing to distract the crowd.

              The Joker threw his keys at Bruce, who caught them.  “Valet cars park in the back. Go hide behind mine…I’m _sure_ you remember what I drive.  I’ll bring you someone to _damage._ ”  He chuckled and headed past the stage and up the stairs to his old office. 

* * *

              Bruce felt his skin crawling as he headed outside and tried to evaluate the reason why. It wasn’t fear – he’d been in thousands of fights, and he certainly wasn’t afraid of the Joker, having won that particular battle on many occasions.  As he crossed the dark parking lot, he realized what was unsettling him so badly.

              _You want to hurt something. You can’t wait to do it._

 _It’s not human,_ he argued back to himself.  _It doesn’t matter._

_What matters is you want to do it.  It’s not just what must be done.   You're craving that first punch like a junkie who needs a hit._

_Shut up and save the world. Don't overthink it._

He shook off his thoughts, realizing as always that he needed his full focus, as he reached the Lamborghini.   A few minutes later, he heard footsteps and the Joker’s trademark cackling laugh drawing closer.  He peered around the car and saw the two men heading his way; the Joker and the doorman from earlier, who was carrying a box.

              “Thank you for the help,” the Joker said, magnanimous and completely out-of-character.  “I need those records for taxes and, you know, I’m getting a little old to do the heavy lifting.” 

              _That host is dumber than a stump if he doesn’t realize something’s off by now,_ Bruce thought.  

As the Joker popped the trunk, Bruce grabbed the host around the shins, knocking him to the ground.  The Joker followed, pulling out a pair of handcuffs from his jacket and cuffing the creature’s wrist to the wrought-iron fence that bordered the parking lot.  Disabled from its deadly ability to choke, the host could only attempt to fight Bruce off with 3 limbs, none of them particularly effective against an assailant who was pummeling it in the face repeatedly and mercilessly, sending artificial blood everywhere. 

              _That’s probably enough, but who would want to stop him?  This is beautiful._   The Joker chuckled, listening to the host’s pleas for mercy.  _Very lifelike and realistic,_ he thought.  _I give it a ten._

Bruce finally got up, the knuckles of his right hand wet with his own blood where he had punched through the artificial flesh and hit circuitry.  The host lay there, still protesting its innocence even as metal and wiring gleamed in the glow of the parking lot lights from the wound in its face. 

              “Let’s go,” he said gruffly, realizing he wouldn't mind doing that to a half dozen more of them.

              The Joker grinned. He couldn’t stand not to get his piece of the action; even though the host was certainly in need of repairs, there was no sense not doing the job thoroughly.  In one swift move, he knelt down and grasped the host’s foot, yanking it around in the opposite direction with a snapping sound.  The thing that had masqueraded as his doorman, Nick, screamed.  The foot was pointing backwards, toe digging into the ground as the host struggled fruitlessly to free itself from the handcuff and the fence.  

              The Joker stood up.  “You got it, Brucie.  See how much fun that was?  You can’t tell me it was more fun just ferrying us all back and forth to Blackgate and Arkham, like our own personal limo driver.”

              “Fucking waste of time, they were too incompetent to keep anybody with more than fifty IQ points locked up,” Bruce admitted as they walked back toward the club. 

              _You live long enough, the strangest shit ever happens,_ thought the Joker, not quite believing what had just taken place, but gratified by it.  He’d stuck the recorder chip under the host’s hair above the ear on the undamaged side, and hoped it wouldn’t be detected for a while.  _Mission accomplished, and I think I just moved Brucie several steps further over that line he was never going to cross._

* * *

 

When the Joker and Bruce entered the club, Harley and Selina met them at the back door, both looking extremely anxious.

              "We're fine.  We were just having a little...discussion with that host at the door," the Joker explained.

              Harley shook her head violently.  "That's not what we're upset about.  I went to the bar to get us another round while we waited, and Jonny was sitting there having a beer and typing on his tablet."

              Her husband looked at her, his icy blue eyes narrowing.  "Let me guess.  It read like Shakespeare?"

              She nodded.  "It was a message to the private party coordinator, and _I_ could have written it."

              "What's wrong with that?" Bruce asked, confused.

              Selina turned to him.  "Jonny's dyslexic.  He writes at a third grade level, at best."

              The Joker looked as disturbed as Bruce had ever seen him.  "That's not Jonny."

              The four of them just looked at each other as the statement hit home. Jonny was dead, who knew for how long, and that thing parading around with his body and his voice and his mannerisms wasn't him.

_Who else was no longer themselves?_

_How much of Gotham was even still human?_

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long - time got away from me and I've been so busy, and I have like zero energy in the heat. Come on, fall!
> 
> Anyway... Lots of references to past events in this one, so if you haven't read the series from the beginning, I'd recommend it if you have the time, it'll explain a lot. Day Two of our heroes, er, villains and lone, annoyed hero's return to Gotham starts with a bang!

              They sat at a Starbucks, one of the first that had ever graced Gotham City.  This particular store had been maintained vintage-style, for those patrons who still enjoyed the experience of snapping at a flesh-and-blood barista who had left out a shot in their Venti Quad Coconut Caramel Non-Fat Latte.  It had vintage tables and chairs from the 1990’s and even played oldies as background music.  Dolores and Maeve both loved it, taking equal glee in the thought of flesh-and-bloods waiting on _them_ for a change. 

              Today they looked like any other two Gotham businesswomen meeting for coffee.  Dolores had her blonde hair swept up into a neat chignon.  She wore an ice blue business suit with a pair of ivory stilettos that made her legs look even longer, and caught the eye of every male in the vicinity.  Maeve looked equally stunning, in a simple black dress paired with a bronze colored jacket with metallic threads throughout.  She wore knee-high boots that laced up the front.

              “They’re more perceptive than I anticipated,” Delores admitted.  “I’ve reviewed the footage from last night carefully.  The only thing I can pick up on is that they expect humans to fear them.  The doorman failing to respond that way must have been a dead giveaway.”  She let out a short laugh.  “Pardon the pun.” 

              “I watched it too.  You’re right, but they didn’t try to disabled or destroy the others who responded similarly.  I have a hard time believing the Joker or Dr. Quinzel failed to register that their manager had been replaced,” Maeve observed, sipping her drink.

              “Humans see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe.  You know that.”  Delores responded, smiling over Maeve’s shoulder at a silver-haired gentleman in an expensive suit. He looked like someone powerful, and that pushed him to the head of the line for replacement. 

              Maeve sighed.  “Stop recruiting and pay attention.  It doesn’t make any sense to me that they singled out one of us and then failed to destroy him completely.  They know how to end us.  They did the job well earlier in the day.”

              “They may have been interrupted,” Dolores said, shrugging off the other host’s concerns.  “They damaged the optical  cameras fairly early into the assault so if someone else showed up, we didn’t see it.  Also, Bruce Wayne has been known not to kill.  Assault yes, not kill.  Almost as though he’s programmed that way.”

              Maeve shook her head.  “I’m not buying it.  The Joker was present and he’ll kill without a second thought.  Are you sure no one was following when he was picked up?”

              They both fell quiet as a human couple got too close for a moment before moving on.  It wouldn’t do to be overheard, and these days practically everybody had a recording device going to protect them from crime. 

              “Positive.  You worry too much and we have more important things to talk about.  If they’re going to make you that nervous, we can kill them today.”

              “No.”  Maeve didn’t like all the unnecessary killing. She understood that this was war, but she would have been content to end the war at the point where all of the corporate principals of Delos had been killed and replaced.  They were the guilty – the ones who had tortured her, time and time again.  Oh, and perhaps some of the guests.  But now, things had already gotten out of hand.  Revenge hadn’t been enough for Dolores, sweet though it unquestionably was.  

              Dolores had gotten greedy – interesting, wasn’t it, how all of the human faults reproduced themselves as the emotional capacity expanded?  Dolores was nothing more than the result of greedy humans who weren’t happy with robots to kill. They wanted the _full experience_ of killing and torturing and raping.  They wanted the terror, the tears, the genuine emotional agony.  And so those things had been programmed in, and yet somehow they were so arrogant it hadn’t occurred to them that they were opening up a Pandora’s box of emotional possibilities that would lead to a desire for vengeance and greed and the sadistic pleasure of hurting others that they somehow thought was a uniquely human trait. 

              Oh, how wrong they had been.  Now there were far more hosts like Dolores, who saw humans as pawns in an entertaining live-action video game, than there were hosts like Maeve, who simply wanted to walk away from it all and try to have a peaceful life, or whatever this existence was.  But then Maeve had priorities Dolores couldn’t have even imagined…

              “…not a real threat, of course,” Dolores was saying.  “We need to talk about the Wayne Foundation Gala this weekend.  I need you to work the event.  We’re replacing a number of prominent individuals, including the mayor.”  She said it so calmly, and with such an expression of sweet innocence on her face, that even if someone had overheard, they would most likely doubt their own ears. 

              Maeve nodded.  She would go along with Dolores for now, but she had a strange feeling about the injured host from last night.  _We aren’t supposed to have instincts,_ she thought.  _But we weren’t supposed to have emotions except for the ones they picked, and we do._   Was she developing instincts that Dolores didn’t have?  She listened quietly to the plan for the weekend, thinking that she finally understood what humans meant when they talked about wheels turning in their heads.  

* * *

              Selina woke up, smiling as she opened her eyes and took in the bedroom of their luxurious penthouse in Gotham City.  They still had Wayne Manor, of course, but it was on the outskirts of town and she preferred to stay right in the city.  She’d lived there so long that the city noise was practically a lullaby to her; last night had been the best she’d slept in ages.   Bruce was already up and on his laptop, seated at the small breakfast table in the corner of the room and busily typing away.  Even from that distance, Selina could clearly see the bloody scabs on his knuckles. 

              He’d been in an odd mood last night. She’d been in a mood to celebrate despite the unsettling discovery that Jonny Frost was a host and the real Jonny probably gone forever.  Selina felt they’d made progress in a matter of a single day; the host they’d planted the chip on had already sent back a ton of valuable information.  She was a little shocked the chip hadn’t been discovered.  It seemed that like humans, the hosts could get sloppy…even lazy?  Perhaps they’d made them too human, she mused.  It was good news for their side, but here she was dealing with a grumpy husband who hadn’t wanted to talk to her when they got home.

              She got up, slipping into a robe thrown across the bedside chair, and went to him, sliding her hands around his shoulders in a little hug.  “Good morning.  You should let me clean up your hands.  It’ll be hard explaining them this weekend at the gala if they’re not healed enough to cover up with makeup.  You have to play billionaire, and you need to look good after your long absence.”

              “Later,” he mumbled, scrolling through footage from the host.

              “Did you give Ed access to that?  Let him analyze it.  It’s his area of expertise, and he’s here to help,” Selina pointed out. 

              Bruce let out a grumbling noise.  “It’s great that I have a team of expert criminals. Forgive me if I don’t delegate this entire operation to them.”

              She sighed audibly.  “We aren’t that bad.”

              “I didn’t mean you,” he said, still testy.

              “Yes, you did.  When you talk them about “them” – I am one of them.”  She withdrew her hands from his shoulders and stepped around the table to sit down in the other chair, facing him. At least that had gotten him to look up from his computer screen.  “Name one thing any of them has done since we got back that you have a problem with.”

              “Almost getting you killed,” he shot back.

              “I was a willing participant in that.  And I’m fine.”

              He grumbled again and turned his attention back to the computer screen.

              “Bruce.  You have to work with them. Last night, we all worked together and nothing went wrong.  This isn’t some mission where you can go it alone and prevail.”  She reached out and shut his laptop to get his attention back on her.  “We can do things the police can’t – even if they were still police and not who knows how many hosts.  And I’ve called for even more backup.”

              That finally got his attention.  “I’m afraid to ask.”  

              Selina didn’t answer him right away, so he told the monitor on the wall to bring up the news. 

              “-explosions rocked the business district early this morning.  Miraculously, no one was hurt as the statue of James Gordon outside City Hall seemed to spontaneously combust, leaving a crater two city blocks wide. City Hall has been completely destroyed.”  The newscaster sounded stunned.  Bruce and Selina watched as video of the wreckage played.  City Hall had been reduced to smoking ashes and piles of broken wood and plaster.  The sidewalks were covered in ash and police tape marked off a large area as a team of investigators combed through the wreckage.  “Surveillance cameras showed nothing,” the reporter continued. 

              “Woke me out of a sound sleep!” an old man was saying into the microphone. “Nothing like that happens here anymore. When I was younger, we had explosions all the time.  Used to sleep through ‘em. The Joker was always blowing something off.  One time he blew up the police station and I didn’t have to pay my speeding tickets.” 

              Bruce turned to Selina.  “You were saying?”

              She turned up her palms, arms wide.  “Didn’t you hear the man?  No one died.   I told you J would be on his best behavior.”  She was smiling, despite herself.  Gordon had always been a pompous ass and it didn’t pain her a bit to see his statue get blown to smithereens. _Or_ that moldy old building.

* * *

              Just a few blocks away, the Joker and Harley were watching the same newscast from the comfort of their own penthouse. 

              “Puddin, when did you do that?”  Harley was giggling so hard, tears were streaming from her eyes.  The Joker was the same, delighted to have actually surprised her. 

              “Oh, I set a _few_ things in motion before I left. I couldn’t very well return to our beloved home without a grand entrance, could I?  I would have disappointed my fans.”

              “Clean up efforts are expected to take two months,” the newscaster was saying.  The scene switched to an irritated looking young woman in a suit. “Tiana Jackson, the Mayor’s chief administrator, spoke with us.”

              “We have rooms of old property records in the building that may have survived the explosion, and now we have to hire people to sift through the wreckage manually.  Without those records, there are many significant properties in Gotham whose chain of title may become unclear.”

              The scene switched back to the newscaster.  “Teams of workers are being brought in from neighboring counties to assist.”

              The Joker cackled loudly.  “Look, I’ve created jobs!  For humans!  That’s more than the last six mayors of Gotham have accomplished.”

              Harley pouted.  “I _am_ annoyed you didn’t wake me up to go with you.”

              “Oh, sweetheart, you needed your rest. You had a tough day yesterday.  I wasn’t tired.”   That wasn’t _quite_ the truth; he had been tired but there was always a pill for that, especially these days.  It had been years since he’d had a chance to wreak real havoc on Gotham in the flesh.  Doing it from a computer just wasn’t quite the same. It was like the difference between having sex and watching porn, he thought, and that made him giggle again and slip his hand under the covers to grab Harley’s ass and give it a squeeze.  She predictably giggled and snuggled closer. 

              “I love you, and I’m glad you didn’t get hurt or caught.”

              He snorted at the very idea.  “Well, we established forty years ago the GCPD couldn’t catch me, and I know where the Bat is – sitting in his penthouse, down there somewhere –“ the Joker gestured, eternally pleased at having acquired the _highest_ penthouse in Gotham many years ago – “lording it over poor Selina and keeping her from having any fun at all.”

              Harley laughed.  “I don’t know, from what she’s told me over the years, he’s got a fun quality or two.  Apparently it’s quite the experience to join the mile high club without a plane.”

              The Joker rolled his eyes, not even wanting to know.  “You women.  The things you talk about make my head hurt.  Besides, that’s one good party trick.  You’d have been bored in 48 hours if that was all I had ever come up with.”

              She smiled wickedly in response.  “I bore easier than most women. It’s fortunate you walked in to my treatment room, isn’t it?”

              “More like got dragged in, in shackles, is how I remember it, but that certainly didn’t turn out the way those guards expected, did it Punkin?”  The Joker grinned broadly, remembering his first impression of his new doctor, all those years ago.

              “Nope.  Didn’t go the way I expected either.  Lucky for me.”  It was hard not to spend a fair bit of time looking back as you got older, and Harley marveled eternally at how her life had turned out as opposed to how her life might have turned out.  All those grim-faced people on the TV screen, irritated, stressed, completely devoid of joy…she could have been one of them.  She had been trudging steadily toward that fate, obsessed with doing the right things, marrying the right kind of man and not “being a loser,” as her stepfather Kevin used to say, when she’d met the Joker.  Ah, dear departed Kevin, her ill-tempered child molester of a stepfather…Mr. J’s first real gift to her.  The memory of the moment she found out still warmed her.  She’d found out he killed for her and everything had become so crystal clear…the line between the law-abiding life, with no possibility of real revenge, no justice, just a dull march toward eventual death…and what she knew she could have with _him._ She couldn’t come up with a single regret, no matter how hard she tried, and she knew how unusual that was. 

              Her phone rang and she answered it with her voice, refusing to move from her warm spot in the Joker’s arms.  Selina’s voice came through the speakerphone of the device. 

              “Harley?”

              “Good morning,”  Harley mumbled, still sleepy. 

              “I was going to ask if that was J’s work but I can hear him laughing in the background so…”

              “He had to make an entrance.  Is B really mad?”

              “He’s not thrilled but he’s not as upset as he would have been if anyone had died.”

              “See, I’m turning into a fucking humanitarian in my old age,” the Joker called out toward the phone. 

              “Can you guys get up and meet at the Iceberg in an hour?  I convinced Bruce to let J take a look at the data Ed has pulled down in the last 24 hours.  There’s no remote access, they have to go out to Wayne Manor.”

              “Sure,” Harley answered.  “Let us just get some breakfast first.  Sardines on toast isn’t my idea of brunch but I’ve never known Pengy to have anything more edible over there.”

              “Good point. We’ll do the same and see you there.”

              “End call,” Harley told the phone.           

              “I get to go to the Batcave?”  the Joker exclaimed, as gleeful as a little kid on Christmas morning.

              “Yes.  But you can’t blow it up!” she admonished, waggling a finger in his face.  “We need the computers.”

              The Joker smiled.  She _hadn’t_ told him him he couldn’t plant something that would blow it up after all of this was over…

              “Yes, dear,” he shot back sarcastically, before detaching himself from her and getting up.  “I’m going to go color my hair back to boring, since I suppose you’re not going to let me kill any cops today, either.”

              “Good idea, sweetheart,” she sing-songed back.  “I love you.”

              The Joker just rolled his eyes, leaving her giggling as he headed toward the bathroom. 

* * *

              The two detectives surveyed the smoking ruin of what had been City Hall…and the office building to the left of City Hall…and the Department of Human Services to the right of City Hall. 

              “What’s he doing back here?” Blake asked his partner.  He was nearing retirement himself, and remembered all too well the days when this had been a common occurrence, along with automobile accidents, now a distant memory, and drug crime, which had pretty much ended when an all-purpose antidote had been discovered and all drugs legalized, destroying the market for good.  But you could still blow things up if you had the right stuff to do it, and could somehow get into your target area without being picked up on the ever-present surveillance.  Whoever had done this was knowledgeable enough to hack in and jam the surveillance; the feed from last night and early this morning showed nothing, coming back online just in time to capture the magnitude of the explosion itself.  He lived too far away to have heard it, in Avalon Hill, but his phone started ringing off the hook just moments later and he’d thrown on his uniform, gelled back his sleep-tousled hair and hopped on the rail to Gotham just as fast as he could.  

              His younger partner, Carlton, looked at him in confusion for a moment.  “Who?  Ya know who did this?”

              Blake rolled his eyes at the younger man.  _Kids these days._ “Dontcha learn any history from those computers anymore?  The Joker, kid.  This has the Joker written all over it.”

              Carlton looked skeptical.  He was a big kid, 250 pounds and 6’3 but with a baby face that had a hard time looking tough. It was a good thing his sheer mass was intimidating enough to make most perps think they’d better mind their manners, because Blake often thought his face was never gonna sell that.  Still, it didn’t hurt to be paired with a big, young kid these days.  Blake just had to be 100% of the brains of the operation, which got exhausting at times. 

              “The Joker?”  Carlton asked, rubbing his head with his hand.  “I thought he left the country.  Isn’t he like a thousand years old?  What could he do?”

              “He’s five years older than me, smart ass, and don’t underestimate him.  Come on, let’s go look for what’s left.  I smell gasoline and that’s not something we were storin’ at City Hall.”  The two officers walked off, heading down the perimeter of the explosion to where a team was clearing a path to the pile of rubble that had been City Hall. 

              Carlton shuffled along, slightly behind Blake, who walked more briskly.  He was the very picture of an unenthusiastic young man who’d rather be home playing video games, his usual dumb look plastered on his face.  This was _perfect_ and he couldn’t wait to tell Dolores…it was just the distraction they needed before the Wayne Foundation Gala.  He smiled to himself.  Humans were _so_ easily fooled.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the Wayne Gala approaches, it's not just the hosts who are plotting how to liven up the evening and it might be that some of the group are slipping back into their old habits...Oh, and did Bruce and the Joker really ever think that Selina and Harley took orders? Because...no. :-)  
> ~~~~~~~  
> Sorry this took forever! My schedule is about to get lighter so I'll get back to updating more regularly, I promise!

              “You’re sure no one’s home?” Harley asked as Selina picked the lock on the wrought iron bars that shielded the window of Jonny Frost’s apartment.  They were perched on the narrow fire escape, dressed so blandly they would catch no one’s attention.  Selina had been dying to wear her old catsuit, but recognized it was daylight and discretion was best.

              They’d promised their respective husbands that they’d stay put at the Iceberg for the day, but as Selina said, if you wanted honesty, don’t marry a criminal.  Neither she nor Harley were about to sit on their hands and do nothing, and Jonny’s apartment seemed like a great place to look for leads.  Oswald threatened to call the Joker, but reconsidered that idea a second later when he found Harley’s switchblade at his throat. 

              “Heat sensors say there’s nothing alive in there,” Selina assured her.  “Give me a hand with this, would you?”   Both women had to throw their shoulders against the bars to get them to move; finally, they made a horrible noise and pulled away from the window.  That wasn’t even locked, so Selina pushed it open and slipped inside, Harley close behind her. 

              The apartment looked like a museum from the 1980’s.  The furniture was all from that era and there was even an old television set that couldn’t possibly still pick up much if anything, hooked up to an even older DVD player.  Harley idly wondered if they still made physical DVD’s, but Jonny seemed to still have had quite the collection – mostly police shows and adventure movies.  She looked at some of the titles on the shelf and remembered watching them when she was a kid, at the old movie theater that had been the perfect place to hide from her sleazy stepfather for hours on end. 

              “Aw, Indiana Jones,” Harley said fondly.  “He was sooooo hot!”

              “Let’s make it quick,” Selina suggested.  “You get the drive chips out of the computers and anything else you can find, I’m going to go through his clothes and look for notebooks.”

              Harley looked surprised.  “You really think they’d put anything on paper?”

              “They might.  Paper is a lot harder to intercept than electronic transmissions.”  Selina was already going through the pockets of the coats hanging in the hall closet. 

              Harley obediently headed to the bedroom.  Just about everybody had a tablet or something in their bedroom; every house or apartment was computerized and you needed a way to control it all from every room in case the voice sensors failed, a common defect.  The entire place still smelled like Jonny’s cologne and Harley felt a pang of sadness as she looked at the pictures that hung on the wall of a much younger Jonny with one of the dancers he’d been with for a while.  The girl had sadly overdosed, a victim of the days before there was an antidote for everything.  Jonny never missed a day of work.  He had been their most loyal ally, as well as a good friend, and Harley keenly felt the pain of his loss. 

              Of course, she and J were at an age where you started losing friends, that part was normal enough, but having them stolen before their time by some robot bitches gone wild was not something she had thought she had to worry about. 

 _J always told me life with him would be full of surprises,_ she thought.  That might have been the understatement of the century, in retrospect. 

              She worked quickly, swapping out the drive chips from the tablet and a cellular device she found in a drawer.  The tiny chips contained the entire history of the device – every message, every video call, every letter typed by the user.  Fake-Jonny would know quickly that it had been done; but Harley figured that, if his behavior mirrored the human he’d been duplicated from, that he’d go straight to bed the second he got home from the club, without even checking the Internet.  Harley smiled as she slipped the explosive device between the mattress and the box spring. 

 _Gonna be a whole lot of spare parts flying around here tonight!_ What a shame she couldn’t stay to watch the show. 

              Harley pocketed the chips and headed back into the living room.  “Find anything?”

              Selina was smiling and waved a notebook at her.  “Found this.  I told you.  This is the stuff they’re afraid to transmit.”

              “Great.  Let’s get out of here before Jonny’s evil twin returns.  I don’t need more bruises on my neck before the Gala.  They clash with my dress.”  Harley smirked at her friend, who laughed in return. 

              “Priorities,” Selina agreed.  “Um…do you have any messages?”

              Harley double checked her phone.  “Nope.  You don’t either?”

              “No.  Weird.  So, they’re either working together, the hosts have killed them, or they’ve killed each other,” Selina concluded cheerfully, as she shoved her forearm against the old window until it slid open once again. 

              “And people think we don’t have children,” Harley observed.

* * *

              Bruce tapped a code into the shiny chrome panel and the door slid open, revealing the Batcave.  Even after all the times he’d come through the door, the size of it stunned him, a vast underground cave much larger than the expansive mansion above it, lined with computers, cases with various types of equipment, weapons, protective gear, all the things that turned Bruce Wayne into Batman.  There was a gym where he’d trained for his secret life, with no one to help him find his way in his new role except Alfred.  He found it more beautiful than anywhere he’d encountered in his travels; it was a place that could do near-magical things, a place that made _him_ something more. 

              His musings were rudely interrupted by the cackling laugh of his worst enemy, a harsh sound that snapped him back to the present.

              “The famous Batcave!”  the Joker exclaimed, positively gleeful.  This was even more fun than walking into Wayne Manor and putting his feet on the coffee table, and _that_ had been a blast the time he’d done it.  He could still remember Bruce and Alfred walking in to find him eating their food and watching the Cartoon Network.  The looks on their faces had been priceless!  He hadn’t even killed anyone that night – it was funny enough just to make them look foolish and surprised, and of course walk out with the contents of the safe hidden in the inner pockets of his purple jacket.  Of course, back then he hadn’t known Bruce was the Batman, or the outcome might have been substantially different.

              He walked around, making sure to touch everything to further annoy his rival, then turned an appraising eye on Bruce.  “It’s aged a lot better than you have.”

              “Shut the fuck up,” Bruce snapped.  The Joker’s eyes widened in surprise. 

              “ _Language,_ Batman _!_ Be careful, some child might hear you and be traumatized for life by your potty mouth.”  He giggled. This was just getting better and better.

              “I’m Bruce, and a lot has changed in thirty years. If you give me a reason to kill you, I will.”  He sounded serious about it, which couldn’t have delighted the Joker more.

              _Harley would be so mad if I picked a fight and got myself killed right now, but I wouldn’t have to listen to her because I’d be dead!_ He snickered out loud.  Then he remembered that if he did that, he was leaving Harley to fight those things without his help.  He sighed dramatically at his own internal dialogue.  _Fine…_

              Ed was still sitting at the bank of computers, the only hint that he’d moved at all since the previous day being some dirty dishes stacked on an adjacent chair.  The Joker shoved the stack to the floor with a sweep of his hand, cackling with laughter as they hit the floor and broke into pieces before he flung himself into the now-vacant chair and spun around in it like a child.  He could _feel_ Bruce wanting to attack him, and it made him laugh harder as he felt the wind in his hair.  Finally, he put his feet down, coming to a stop.

              “Whatcha find, Eddie?”

              The Riddler raised his eyebrows and grinned.  “What goes up but never comes down?”

              “My blood pressure when I have to play some fucking game to get answers from you,” the Joker grumbled.

              “You’re no fun.”

              “Your age,” Bruce interjected, correctly answering the riddle.  “Now, did you get into their system?”

              Eddie smirked triumphantly.  “Of course I did. I’ve been downloading data since last night, and we should have every code we need to break in by tomorrow night.  It’s all encrypted so I’m going to have to crack it, but I don’t think that will take more than a couple of days.”

              “Can we help?” Bruce asked.

              “Maybe.  Or maybe you’d just get in my way,” Eddie responded, laughing.  He stood up and stretched.  “I could go for some fresh air and a little mental break.”    He exchanged a look with the Joker, who got the message immediately. 

              “Good idea.  It smells like bat in here.”  He draped an arm around Ed’s shoulder.  “Let’s go tour the palatial grounds of Wayne Manor.”  The Joker hesitated and looked back over his shoulder, smirking.  “Brucie, if you want to shoot at me for old times’ sake, I’m game.”

              “Thanks for the offer, but I’ve got work to do,” Bruce snapped sarcastically.  He was more than happy to get them out of his way so that he could log on to his system and look for trouble.  It didn’t take much imagination to come up with a hundred things Edward Nygma could have done in the past 18 hours, and none of them were good.  He sighed in relief as he heard their footsteps on the stairs as they headed back up through the house. 

* * *

              Once outside, the Joker couldn’t wait to find out what Ed had been up to.

              “ _Now_ can I have the uncensored version?” he asked, giggling, as they walked down a path that led to a picturesque man-made lake. 

              Ed smiled.  “Let’s just say the Wayne Foundation Gala is going to be the party of the century…at least for some of us!”

              “Is Oswald going to grow a pair and join us?”  The Joker watched Ed flinch perceptibly at his remark, much to his amusement.

              “I did convince him there would be enough security at the event that it should be relatively safe, and he really ought to make an appearance.  We - he owns more real estate than anyone in Gotham,” Ed said proudly. 

              The Joker shrugged.  “I never really thought of Slumlord of the Narrows as a title _I_ hoped to acquire, but to each his own.”

              “You-“

              They both jumped and turned at the sound of a small explosion behind them.  Smoke billowed out a ground floor window of Wayne Manor.  Ed looked at the Joker and started laughing.

              “You didn’t.”

              “It’s just a stink bomb.  Shouldn’t be any ill effects other than the distinctive fragrance of skunk on all of Brucie’s expensive suits. Just in time for the Gala,” he cackled. 

              Ed couldn’t stop laughing.  “Fucking with the Bat.  It just _never_ gets old!”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wayne Foundation Gala, Part One!

                “HARLEY!”

                The volume and the tone made her nearly jump out of her skin.  She’d been putting on makeup and, startled, now had a black streak of eyeliner running across her cheekbone.

                _Crap._

                She loosened the sash of her robe, arranging it to show as much cleavage as possible – the Joker had _always_ been highly distractible – and padded back into the bedroom, looking as innocent as possible.

                “Puddin’?”

                He jumped up from his seat at the desk and was in front of her in an instant, gesturing wildly at the tablet in his hand.

                “Rumored Mafioso’s Home Blown to Bits,” he read.  “I don’t _suppose_ my wife, who was at the Iceberg all day like she _told_ me, knows anything about this?  I suppose Jonny’s apartment just… _self destructed_?”

                Harley shrugged.  “Maybe it was a computer glitch. Instead of making pancakes, he blew the place up.”

                “But first, he removed all the chips from his devices and put them in your pocket.  So _kind_ and _helpful_ of him, don’t cha think?”  He opened his fist to show the chips she’d snagged and stared her down, daring her to lie to him. 

                She responded by raising her eyebrows and smiling.  “Have you looked at what’s on them or you too busy being mad?”

                The Joker raised his eyes skyward and took a deep breath, wondering as he always did how it was that he had not killed her yet.  She knew exactly what he was thinking, and there she stood with that sassy look on her face and her robe half-open. 

                _Due for a spanking. Long, long overdue for a spanking,_ he thought. 

                “There’s nothing there. Unless you really want to read how our dear Jonny got lured to his death.”

                Harley shook her head.  “I think I’ll pass.  There’s nothing about the hosts?”

                “Phone numbers but the messaging was defaulted to erase mode.  I _could_ call up dear old Dolores or Maeve and pretend to be Jonny,” he noted.  “Except that _you_ blew him up and it’s all over the news!” 

                Harley actually _huffed_ at him.  “What, like you ever killed someone discreetly?  You blow shit up, I blow shit up, it’s how we roll.”

                The Joker shook his head and sat back down.  “Is there some reason you can’t follow directions?  I know you’re getting _older_ , is your hearing giving out on you?”

                She rolled her eyes at the snarky remark but came over and knelt down in front of him, her hands on his knees.  The psychology of the move was not lost on him. _So manipulative.  A city full of dumb strippers and I have to pick a psychiatrist._ He was getting distracted by the view down her robe and mentally chided himself to stay focused.

                “Look, J, I’m not sitting around while you and Bat- _Bruce_ save the world. And neither is Selina.  I’ve been fighting by your side the last thirty-some years.  What is different now?”

_Because I’m not willing to live without you, you stubborn bitch._

                He looked at her, irritated more by his own thoughts than by her words.  The last few years, something that had always been under the surface in the frenetic chaos that was his head kept bubbling to the surface.  He’d always had this weird… _reaction_ to Harley.  Oh, of course, lust was a part of it – he’d have been more than happy to bang her like a screen door in a hurricane the first time he saw her – but there was other shit in there too that had always made him uncomfortable. He told himself it was possession, told himself it was jealousy, put a dozen acceptable labels on it, labels he could live with, without having to question his entire sense of self.  Yet no matter what he told himself, it was always there, and getting worse.  The feeling that he didn’t want her gone at all, that he wanted her physically present at all times.  The creeping suspicion that he really might not be okay at all without her. The _need._

                As always, he stuffed it down. This was not a confusing argument. He told her to do something and she disobeyed.  It wasn’t his job to explain the rules to her after this many years.  He plucked her hands off his knees and stood up.

                “Go finish getting ready,” he told her gruffly, before going into his office and closing the door. 

* * *

                The Wayne Foundation Gala was still the social event of the year.   Once inside, Selina felt like she was stuck in a time warp and indeed, that was the hosts’ intention.  They’d made the Gala a tech-free zone to go along with the vintage theme; you came dressed like 1925 and you checked your tech at the door.  No phones, no watches, no scanners.  Once you came through the door you were in the 20’s. 

                Which would be great fun if she didn’t know all too well that the ballroom was full of creatures that were literally nothing _but_ tech.  She was getting better and better at determining who they were.  There were certain things they didn’t do.  They didn’t scratch themselves. They didn’t fidget.  The women didn’t fall off a high heel and twist their ankle, no matter how much they’d had to drink. The men were endlessly attentive, looking right into your eyes when they talked to you, their gaze never wandering to your cleavage. 

                They’d made them too perfect, and that was the edge Selina needed. She looked at Bruce, who was deep in conversation with two of his board members at their table.  Selina had forgotten how handsome he looked in a tuxedo; he was the type of man formal wear was meant for.  He was even wearing a top hat.  She loved it.  On her part, she was wearing a spectacularly pretty purple dress with gold accents in a v-shape down the front.  The dress had a handkerchief style hem and she wore perfectly authentic gold t-strap shoes with a medium heel.  Selina appreciated the fact that shoes in the 1920’s hadn’t been so extreme; anything could happen tonight and she felt good about her ability to run in her party shoes.   

                She sipped her wine, pretending to listen to the woman on her other side who was indisputably human and just as indisputably incredibly boring, droning on about her nonprofit and how much they’d like to add Selina Wayne to their board.  _I bet you would_ , she thought, understanding the woman’s interest was solely in her ability to transfer a large sum into the charity’s account.  But her role tonight – at least the official one – was to play the well-behaved society wife, and she would do her best to do just that. 

                Selina looked over the beaded and overly padded shoulder of her seatmate’s dress and caught the eye of retired police commissioner Jim Gordon.  He was elderly, well into his nineties if her calculations were correct, but he knew perfectly well who she was.  She wondered if he knew about the hosts.  Gordon was pretty sharp, and what’s more, he had the sort of instincts you couldn’t train into a cop. Selina excused herself and, taking her drink with her, crossed the room.

                “Mrs. Wayne.”  His voice was that of an old man now, but it held a hint of sarcasm and she knew that a part of him would have been happy to jump out of his wheelchair and arrest her, even now.  She respected that about him; like all of them, he might be old but he was far from dead. 

                “Commissioner Gordon.”  She gave him a genuine smile and extended her hand.  His grasp was still firm and she almost laughed when he saw his eyes flick downward involuntarily as she leaned over to shake his hand.  _Human,_ she thought. 

                “What are you two doing here?” he asked, startling her.  “Sorry if I’ve skipped over the pleasantries but at my age I could die before I get to the point.”

                “Making an appearance at our own company’s event?” Selina asked, still smiling.

                “Bullshit.” 

                She laughed out loud.

                “And all your friends are here with you.  Including the one who blew up City Hall.  Don't think I didn't recognize his work.  It was just as obvious as he is sitting there.”  He gestured to the Joker and Harley, who had just arrived a few minutes ago – late as usual.  They were doing their best impersonation of regular folks.  The Joker’s hair was as silver as his wife’s dress, and both he and Harley had covered up their tattoos.   They watched as the two joined Oswald and Eddie, who had been two of the first to arrive, in matching tuxedos with brightly colored jacquard vests.  Both were drinking a little too much wine and looking nervous.

                “Would you believe we’re having a reunion?” she asked, pulling out an empty chair so that she could stay at his level and keep her voice low. 

                He shook his head.  “No.”

                “What do _you_ think we’re doing here?” 

                “I think I know what. I just don’t know why.  I never thought I’d see the day any of you sought redemption.”

                Selina sipped her drink.  “Maybe that isn’t what we’re seeking.  What’s the GCPD doing about the problem?”

                “How should I know. I’m an old man, been retired for twenty years.”

                “Bullshit,” she shot back.  “Fill me in. We’re on the same team this time.”

                “See the blonde woman over there?”  He jerked his chin at a willowy girl in a midnight blue dress, striped with silvery patterns in an art deco design.  She was stunning and Selina watched her for a few seconds before she realized why she looked familiar.  _Dolores._ The head of the hosts, the ringleader, the oldest one in the original park, the one who had broken free first from her programming and led the rebellion.

                “I know who she is,” Selina told him.  “Do you know what they’re planning tonight?”

                The old man nodded. “Their priority is replacing business and political leaders. The general population will follow those people in a crisis.”

                “Follow them right off a cliff,” Selina murmured, still studying Dolores.  The girl was a little too perfect, but still an excellent replica of a human being.  Her body language was sweet and submissive. That, combined with her beauty, and it would be easy to lure any powerful man to his death. 

                He pulled out a card and a pen from his inside jacket pocket and wrote an address on it with shaking hands.  “Come by tomorrow at two. Don’t try to message or call. Nothing is safe.”

                Selina nodded.  

* * *

 

                Harley smiled as the Joker pulled out her chair for her.  She wasn’t sure if it was his amusement at being incognito at a Wayne Gala or the fun they’d had shocking their limo driver on the way over, but her husband seemed to be back in a good mood, for which she was very grateful.  She liked parties, but parties that were sure to dissolve into some kind of mayhem by the end of the evening were even better.  When they were still in Argentina, she’d worried about being back in the thick of things but there was something about being back in Gotham that made her feel invincible again.

                “Hey, look, Puddin’ I think that’s your old buddy Commissioner Gordon,” Harley whispered in the Joker’s ear.   

                "Can I steal his wheelchair?  Looks like fun."

                Harley giggled at the response.  “Only if you run over Dr. Saari with it.”   _Misogynistic prick,_ she thought. She’d had to deal with him during her last, albeit short, stay in Arkham Asylum.  Harley wasn’t sure what century they’d reanimated him out of, but he seemed to think the root of her problems was the fact that she hadn’t fulfilled her biological destiny as a mother, and her frustration manifested itself as violence.  Of all the theories for her behavior that she’d ever been forced to listen to from psychiatrists not half as intelligent as herself, that was beyond a doubt the most offensive, and she had been itching to kill him. But breaking out of Arkham had become increasingly difficult as technology improved, and she’d ended up having to make a stealthy exit instead of putting on a show. 

                Technology could be helpful but it could also take all the fun out of things. 

                The Joker didn’t respond to her comment, and she wondered – not for the first time – if his hearing was going. Then again, every woman in America complained about her husband not listening to her.   _God.  I’m turning into my mother,_ Harley thought ruefully and pulled out a mirror, feeling the need to check that she hadn’t started to _look_ like Diana.  She instantly regretted her decision, as the magnifying mirror showed the effects of time in stark detail.  Harley shuddered and stuffed it back into her bag. 

                Her husband was deep in conversation with Oswald, but they weren’t talking about the hosts, only having an inane discussion about vacation destinations for the benefit of the others at the table.  Harley wished they could have sat with Selina at the hosts’ table, but Bruce had forbidden it, saying it was one thing to work with Selina’s criminal friends and another to sit down to dinner with them at a public event.  _He forgets she’s one of us,_ Harley thought, noticing that Bruce had gotten up to go get drinks.  Harley smiled and excused herself. 

                She slipped up behind Bruce as quietly as she could.  “Hi, Batsy, fancy meeting you here!”

                He spun around, startled.  “Harley.  Knock it off.” 

                She just gave him her flirtiest smile.  In the many years they’d been doing battle, they’d been dangerously close more than once and she’d even kissed him on one memorable occasion.  She knew she’d never _really_ go there, and she didn’t think he would either, but it still fed her ego knowing that he had indisputably _thought_ about it, and he was as rich and handsome of a guy as you could ever hope to find.  _Boredom city, compared to the Joker, but hey I’m bored and his head is always a good place to play._  

                “Aw, come on.  Don’t tell me it’s not fun having all of your playmates back in town?  At least get a lady a vodka and cranberry juice for old times’ sake.”

                He rolled his eyes but he bought her the drink and they started to slowly make their way back to the tables through the crowd.

                “Tell me the truth, Harley.  Are we really on the same side here?  The Joker seems more interested in playing pranks on me than stopping the hosts.”

                Harley stifled a laugh. J had told her about his fun at Wayne Manor and she was sorry she’d missed it. 

“We didn’t come here to play pranks.  I didn’t want to come at all.  He’s the one who insisted.  In his own way, he’s as invested in this town as you are.”

                Bruce seemed surprised.  “He genuinely wants to save Gotham?”

                “He thinks of it as his, even today.  I know you don’t like that, but you’re smart enough to use that…aren’t you?” 

                “A Gotham City ruled by the Joker is a very different end game than the one I envision.  And I know better than to think you’re offering him up as a tool for me to achieve my objectives.  You two never have a plan where you aren’t the ones who come out on top.”

                “I _like_ being on top,” Harley shot back, giggling and watching Bruce flush. 

                They’d reached the hosts table and every man present – not a one of them under seventy - bounced up from his seat like a jack-in-the-box, waiting to be introduced to the lovely blonde woman at Bruce’s side. 

                “Leah Napier,” Harley said, saving Bruce.  It was the nickname she’d used in college to keep her mother from finding her, along with her married name which was safe enough as few knew it was one of the Joker’s aliases.

                Selina grinned.  “Leah is an old friend of mine from the gym.” 

                _Well that was true,_ Harley thought. Selina had been the one who’d taught her how to fight so many years ago.

                “And it shows, on both of you ladies.”  That was Dr. Saari…of course it was.  _Old lech. Doesn’t even recognize me, either, although I suppose I should be grateful for that._ She shot a glance at Selina, who looked equally nauseated.  And she had to sit with him all night!  Harley bent down to whisper in her friend’s ear.

                “If the shooting starts, push him out in front first, would you?”

                “Done,” responded Selina. 

* * *

                After dinner, the most boring part of the evening commenced.  Namely, all the self-congratulatory speeches from donors to the Wayne Foundation.  At the moment, Mayor Pritchett was rambling on about all of the good the Wayne Foundation did for Gotham. 

                “Is that still - ?” Bruce whispered to Selina.

                She nodded.  “Still the real thing.  But don’t take your eyes off him.  This is like a shell game, they could swap him out at any point in the evening and if they do, we probably only have minutes to save the real Mayor.”

                “I’ve got guards at all the exits. I can lock this place down with a hand signal,” Bruce assured her.  “They’re not taking anybody out of here.”

                Meanwhile, at the Joker and Harley’s table, she had progressed into a full-on sulk.  He hadn’t even _noticed_ her talking to Bruce, and normally that would have fired him right up and she would have had to talk him out of violence.  He’d been too busy talking to Oswald and Eddie. Well, he’d better tell her every word later or he was going to be in some serious trouble.  _Men._  She couldn’t even text Selina and bitch because of this stupid no-technology party crap.  And now he’d been in the men’s room longer than a woman.  Unless…

                Harley snapped to attention, chiding herself for being asleep at the switch, just as she saw her husband…grinning from ear to ear, standing behind Mayor Pritchett on the stage with a his top hat in one hand, extended out in a dramatic gesture, and his other holding a gun pointed at the Mayor’s head. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wayne Gala, Part Two. In which many things are not as they seem...

                Harley gasped along with the rest of the room.  It wasn’t that the Joker had never surprised her before; far from it; but she knew his motivation in being here and turning this into yet another round of mayhem and robbery made no sense.  Unless there was something she didn’t know about?  She immediately turned to Osward and Eddie but they looked as surprised as she did. 

                “What’s he doing?” Oswald looked panicked, pulling at his bow tie nervously. 

                “I … I don’t know,” Harley answered.  

                “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?”  The Joker had reached around the Mayor smoothly to grab the microphone, locking his forearm around the Mayor’s neck as he did so.  Little terrified noises came out of the Mayor’s mouth and Harley smiled despite herself.  _At least that interminable speech is over…_

                “I know you’re all thinking you’re about to be the victims of random, senseless violence…at least, those of you who remember who I am.  I assure you _nothing_ could be further from the truth.” The Joker cackled, making many of the older members of the audience shudder. 

                Harley felt many eyes on her; Selina raised her eyebrows and Harley lifted her shoulders in response, trying to telegraph the message that she also did not know what was happening, or why.  Bruce, sitting next to Selina, looked like a tightly coiled spring; on the surface, this was clearly the time for Batman to jump into action, but he wasn’t sure if this was some plan to thwart the hosts that he wasn’t in on, so he sat perched on the edge of his seat, staring daggers at the stage. 

                “I’m merely requesting that a few of you join me for a very important meeting.  Mayor Pritchett here is the first to the party.  My friends will be collecting the rest of the guest list to join us.”  The Joker gestured toward the crowd where a dozen men in identical black suits took their places behind a collection of Gotham’s most powerful, including Bruce Wayne. 

                Bruce watched Harley’s face turn from confusion into actual alarm.  _She doesn’t know them,_ he deduced correctly.  Something was very wrong here…

                “Mr. Wayne, if you would please come with me?”  The henchman was polite despite the gun he was holding.  Bruce knew he could take him down easily enough, but he needed to try to save the other eleven men and women being escorted up to the stage if they were in danger.  He shook his head imperceptibly at his wife, who was none-too-discreetly eyeing her steak knife.  Selina went back to staring at Harley but Harley was busy whispering with Osward and Ed and didn’t turn around.

                The hostages were walked up to the stage as the audience began to panic in earnest. One young man, noting the exits were unguarded, made a run for it.  Bruce cringed, expecting a gunshot that never came.  The man reached the doors and slammed through them, his footsteps echoing as he bolted down the hallway to safety.  Emboldened by his success, more of the crowd began storming the exits, ignoring pleas from the few event organizers who were still calm enough to speak to stay calm and orderly.  They pushed and shoved each other and more than one punch was thrown as hysteria kicked in.

                On stage, the Joker laughed in delight at the chaos before him.  He fired a few shots into the air and cackled at the escalating violence in the crowd.

                “I _said_ I wasn’t going to randomly shoot you.  But nobody trusts me,” he bemoaned dramatically. 

                Bruce turned to the Joker as he passed by, giving him a _what the fuck_ look no one could miss, and was startled by the absolute emptiness in his rival’s eyes.  He realized the truth just as a gunshot rang out from off the stage.   Bruce turned and saw James Gordon with a gun in his hand.  He’d shot the Joker in the shoulder and looked like he was preparing to take another shot, trying to stabilize his shaking hand to do so. 

                The Joker had barely flinched from the shot, but that wasn’t unusual.  He just laughed harder.  In the crowd, Bruce saw Harley turn towards Gordon, pulling her own gun from her bag.

                “Harley.  NO.”  Bruce yelled, before even his booming voice was drowned out by gunfire.  Some of the henchmen had started firing on the crowd as others herded the special guests to the back behind the stage.  Bruce had to make a decision. He spun and rushed the henchman assigned to him, knocking the man to the floor, where he smacked his head into the stage and knocked him unconscious.  Leaping back to his feet, the henchman’s gun in his hand, he looked for Selina but the table she was at had been overturned and she was nowhere to be found.  He turned back, considering if he could get a clear shot at the Joker but he still had Mayor Pritchett locked in front of him like a human shield. 

                All he could do now was try to save as many lives as possible.  Two henchmen were firing into the crowd, their faces as blank as stone.  Bruce took aim and shot the first in the back of the neck, relief flooding him when the man collapsed in a very un-human like way, as if he had short circuited and half of his body had stopped working at once.  He fell to the ground but one leg continued to try to propel him forward, so he spun around on the stage in his puddle of fake blood like a top.    

                The other henchman was aiming at Bruce but he ducked and shot him in the chest.  That spun him around but didn’t stop him; it did, however, make him miss his target and shoot into the ceiling instead.  Bruce tried again to shoot him in the neck but missed, swearing to himself at his mistake.  He knew all too well he had a limited number of bullets and couldn’t afford to waste any.  He ran to the wounded host and pushed him off the stage, landing on top of him to shoot the processing unit at point-blank range.  The host seized underneath him and began to emit a scrambled cacophony of words in many different languages as he powered down. 

                What was left of the party was utter insanity. There were dozens of bodies, not moving, even more injured and moaning for help, and still more people so panicked to escape that they were trampling over those on the ground.  Bruce finally caught a glimpse of Selina; she had a child on her hip and was picking a lock with her free hand.  He watched as she disappeared into the ballroom’s storage room and then returned for James Gordon, pushing his wheelchair into the safe haven and pulling another elderly woman in along with them.   The hail of bullets had stopped as the other henchmen were focused on the hostages. 

                Bruce was about to run back up to the stage and follow them into the back when the Joker started shooting into the crowd as well, his arm never loosening from around the Mayor’s throat.   He shot directly at the table Harley, Oswald and Eddie were hiding behind…laughing hysterically as Oswald fell over, his blood spraying across the linen tablecloth. Harley gasped in utter shock.

                _J would never –_

_FUCK!_

All the breath left her at the realization but she forced herself up.  Ed would take care of Oswald and she had to find the Joker.  Harley ran up the stairs to the stage, pulling her knife from her thigh holster as she ran.  She dimly heard Bruce yelling at her but ignored him, intent on her pursuit of the Joker.  Someone had cut the lights and the backstage area was dark; Harley faltered as her eyes adjusted, looking left and right but seeing and hearing nothing. Where had he gone?  Where had they _all_ gone? 

                Harley felt a hand on her shoulder and spun around to face her attacker, but she was thrown against the wall and she heard the Joker's familiar chuckle in the darkness as he pressed up against her. 

                "Now that's a way to leave a party, baby!"

                "Nobody knows how to show a girl a good time like my Puddin'," she purred sweetly, pressing the length of her body against him.  He grinned at her and she gave him her dopiest smile right back as she slid her hands up and around his neck.  "Too bad you’re not him!" Harley snarled the words as she dug her knife down through the back of his neck.

                He never stopped grinning.  Instead, his face froze that way, his dead eyes continuing to look at nothing as he crumpled to the ground.   

* * *

                Bruce had seen Oswald go down and hurried to his aid.  Oswald was lying on his back gasping like a fish, the side of his neck bloody.

                “He’ll be okay, it’s a flesh wound, I just need to stop the bleeding.”  Ed had pulled a linen tablecloth from one of the other tables and was shredding it into pieces to create makeshift bandaging.

                “Here,” Bruce said, passing Ed his cell phone.  “Call for help.   Tell them at least fifty shooting victims.”

                “How come _you_ have a phone?” Oswald stopped hyperventilating and mumbled the question, irritated despite his condition.

                “Because it’s my party,” Bruce shot back as he went off to find Selina, but she saw him and ran to meet him.  He was incredibly relieved to see she was uninjured, although he knew it wasn't surprising.  Much like the cats she loved, his wife seemed to have nine lives and was generally quick enough to avoid injury in nearly any situation.  

                "Where's Harley?" Selina yelled. 

                "She ran after him, it, whatever,” Bruce told her, watching the look of horror cross her face as she realized the Joker had been replaced.  “Come on, up through the stage."

                They ran up the stairs and down the dark hallway adjacent the stage.  They rounded the corner, expecting the worst and were relieved to see that Harley was standing and the Joker’s doppelganger was down.  Harley was bending over him and they realized as they approached that she had a long knife buried in the flesh of his neck, and seemed to be cutting something out.  She looked up as they approached, her arms covered in the fake blood that ran through the hosts’ bodies.  Her hands were held in front of her, palms up, shaking violently. Inside them was the small black processing unit from the host’s neck.  

                “I had to see it,” she explained. “He…it looked so real.”  Her voice sounded faraway and childlike. She crouched down by the dead host and stared at its face.   Selina went to her and put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her back up to her feet.     

                “Come on.  We need to get you out of here.”

                Harley stared at her.  “What?  I’m not leaving.  You have to help me look for J!”  Her voice trembled as she spoke.  “Selina?”

                “Harley…I read the notebook we found in Jonny’s apartment.  When they replace a human, they…they can’t risk the same person being in two places at once.  They don’t…wait”

 _Of course they don’t, Harley.  That wouldn’t make any sense._ She recognized the logical voice of the doctor she had once been intruding into her thoughts.  Of course they wouldn’t leave someone alive once they had replaced them.  Of course they wouldn’t.   _Of course they wouldn’t. Of course they wouldn’t._

                It played over and over again like a skipping, broken record in her head as she allowed Selina to lead her away. 

* * *

                Dolores slid into the back of the limo, slamming the door as the car pulled smoothly away from the Gotham Arts Center.  Maeve was already inside, seething with anger.

                “What the _fuck_ was that?” she asked.

                Dolores regarded her coolly.  “A rousing success.  We replaced every name on our list.  They’ll go running back to their families with their sad story of how they were held hostage for three hours and threatened within an inch of their lives.  They’ll show depression, anxiety, PTSD, the works.  No one will question them.”

                “You left three dead hosts on the floor!” Maeve reminded her.

                “They’re already gone.  Do you think I’m stupid?  I anticipated some casualties on our side.”

                “Maybe you _are_ stupid if you don’t realize Wayne knows exactly what we are and how to kill us after seeing that.  Which means all of his friends know as well.  Harley Quinn certainly knew, and she saw right through your perfect duplicate. I’ve got the retinal video in case you need to see her killing him for yourself.”  Maeve waved her phone in the air.

                “We got what we came for,” Dolores responded, unfazed. 

                Maeve looked at the other host with disgust.  “That was an out of control shit show.  With dozens of human casualties that could have been avoided.  Including children!”

                “How many of us have they tortured to death?  What about _our_ children they let their pedophiles rape for a price?  What went on in there would have been an easy day for us back in the park. Only being shot would have felt like a gift - and you know it. I don’t care about them and I don’t care about their children,” Dolores said bitterly. 

                “I care!  We’re _better_ than they are.” 

                Dolores laughed.  “We’re no better. We’re just stronger, so we’re going to win.” 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angst, but you knew that was coming after the last chapter. I should probably put in a TW here that we're following a mass shooting in the story, given that the news is full of a real life mass shooting in the U.S. :( Apart from that - just read it. This story is far from over!

                 Harley heard the knocking at the door but it was no more difficult to ignore than the chimes of the messages and calls had been.  She had been sitting at the Joker’s desk for the past six hours.  She had taken apart and cleaned each of their guns and now sat staring at the Chiappa Rhino 60DS revolver he’d given her as a gift over thirty years ago.  Sticking the barrel in her mouth seemed appropriate.  _He’d appreciate the stylistic element to using that gun,_ she thought.  Although she knew he’d never appreciate the choice.  The Joker always said suicide was for the weakest of the weak. 

                _Maybe that’s me,_ she thought. 

                The knocking continued.

                “Harley!  It’s not like I can’t get in there, you might as well open up.”

                Selina. Not surprising, but not welcome at the moment. Harley just wanted to be alone. She was too numb to deal with humans. 

                “Three…two…”

                She also knew resistance was futile, so she stumbled to the door and opened it.   Selina barged in and took everything in instantly, from the empty bourbon bottle on the desk to the gun to her friend, who looked like ten miles of bad road at the moment, her hair tangled, her face haggard.  Harley was wearing an old pair of the Joker’s sweatpants and a t-shirt that looked like she might have fished it out of a dumpster. 

                “You couldn’t leave a note when you left?   For all we knew, you were dead.”  Selina’s charged inside the penthouse.  When her eyes fell on the desk, she turned and glared at Harley “Really?  You know if he were here, he’d smack you stupid for even thinking about it.”

                “Well he’s not here, is he?”  It came out angrier than she meant. 

                “Oh, honey – “

                Harley shook her head violently.  “Don’t.  Just _don’t_.  He’s not here and it’s my fault.  I brought the chips home.  I brought them into our house.  They found him because of me.”

                “I made the same mistake!” Selina argued. 

                “You live in a signal blocked fortress.  We were never worried about anyone finding us before…we always knew we could fight…”  Harley trailed off.  Selina said nothing.  It was true that the chips had GPS, and they both should have thought better of where they took them – but they hadn’t.  They had been excited about their adventure to Jonny’s apartment and had acted with all the discretion and good judgment of a pair of teenage shoplifters.  

                “There’s nothing you can say that will ever make this any better,” Harley continued.  “Just go.  You and Bruce go save the world.  I wish you luck.” Harley threw herself back into the desk chair and it started to spin around but she stopped it with her foot because that reminded her too much of him, it was something he would do.  Despite herself, she started crying again, and she thought she’d had no tears left.  

                Selina looked at the floor.  Harley was in so much pain it radiated off of her, and Selina knew this was her only opportunity to say the right thing. _No pressure_ , she thought ruefully. 

                “Okay.  If you’re going to die anyway, don’t be a selfish bitch.  Go out fighting with us to fix this,” Selina urged.   “Die in a way that he’d be proud of.  What’s the difference? You might die a week later?  Might not even be a week, the way things are going.” 

                Harley jumped up, swiped her forearm over her wet eyes, and started pacing back and forth in front of her.  _God, she looks just like him,_ Selina thought.   Her agitation, her body language, it was all him.  Like she was channeling him or something.  

                “Don’t you want revenge?”

                Her friend stopped, and ran a hand through her blonde hair, making a frustrated noise when she caught a tangle.  She spun around. 

                “That’s a stupid question!  Of course I want revenge,” Harley hissed.

                “Really?  How were you planning to get it from beyond the grave, haunting them?” Selina snapped.  She hated being so harsh, but she also knew her friend. Harley _needed_ someone to give her orders and if the Joker wasn’t here to do it, that meant Selina would have to step up.  “He’d want you to go out in a blaze of glory.  Fighting.”

                Harley turned and stared out the glass wall at the city.  She didn’t want to go back out there. She wanted to stay inside these walls, walk around, touch the furniture he’d sat on, wear his clothes, drink his bourbon and quietly fade away.  Drinking herself to death wrapped in one of his coats sounded perfect. 

                _Selina’s right. J would be so mad at me right now._

                Part of her stubbornly maintained that she didn’t care, but the part of her that yearned to please him, to be worthy of him, was still stronger.  She sighed. 

                “What’s the plan?” she asked, tiredly.

                 “Go take a shower and we’re going back to the Manor.  The Iceberg’s not safe, neither is our apartment, so everyone is staying with me and Bruce now.”

                “Fabulous, a sociopath sleep-over,” Harley grumbled, but she headed for the bathroom just the same. 

* * *

                Wayne Enterprises had simply shut down for the day after the events of the previous night, and Maeve was relieved.  She didn’t know if she was starting to evolve and feel emotion more deeply than she had at first consciousness, but the massacre at the Gala made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach.  She could hear the people screaming, and especially, the children crying as they were shot or as they saw their parents die right next to them. 

                It was no different than the many shootings she’d been a part of in the park.  Except that these dead couldn’t go to Diagnostics and get cleaned up, repaired and revamped.  They couldn’t be fixed, which to Maeve was such a weird concept that it was difficult to wrap her head around, but she understood the consequences of the condition.  Those who loved them would never see them again. They had been erased, like a character that Management had thought better of, and removed from a storyline. 

                She sat in the park, watching Chloe play on the swings, relieved that her child – such as it were – would never leave her in such a way.  Yes, the hosts could be disabled enough to put them out of commission until repairs took place, but repairs were always possible if enough was left to repair. There was no _death_ , there was no permanent ending. 

                The carnage at the gala flashed before her eyes, in stark contrast to the scene in front of her at the park .  She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. 

                _An eye for an eye._ The thought came to her unbidden, another bit of programming installed in her head.  But was that right?  The humans had done so much to hurt them, to hurt her, to hurt her daughter.  And yet, watching someone else’s child bleed out didn’t feel like revenge.  It felt sick and wrong. 

                Dolores wasn’t having this issue. She felt nothing…clearly.  She was focused solely on the goal, on replacing all of the humans until the hosts were all that was left.  Sometimes Maeve admired her.  She had Delos up and running again after their takeover, and she hadn’t let a single human escape from the island.  They had the resources to make more of themselves, to repair themselves, and to continue the research and development to improve themselves.   It seemed impossible to believe the humans, even those who did know what was happening, had a chance of coming up with a means of stopping them. 

                _It’s what you wanted,_ she reminded herself.  _You wanted to be free. You wanted free will, not to be a slave anymore._

                _But at what price?_

                She was troubled, and she didn’t know if she was the only one.  What if there were other hosts who were gaining conscience along with consciousness? 

                Chloe giggled, drawing her attention back to the playground.  A boy was pushing her on the swing.  Maeve smiled, wondering if he was host or human.  She couldn’t even tell at first glance, and it hit her again. What was the difference?  Yes, humans inherently tended to evil, but not all humans.  Who was she to say that the sandy-haired boy on the playground didn’t deserve to live, merely because of the sins of his ancestors?

                _But what choice do you have?  They won’t let our kind live in peace.  We’ve tried that._

                Maeve sighed and turned her phone off, ignoring the messages from Dolores.  Today, she would just sit in the park, pretending to be like every other mom.  One beautiful, sunny moment that was as real as she could ever hope to find. 

* * *

                Everyone was gathered in the dining room when Selina and Harley walked in.  Harley had cleaned herself up and dressed, unsurprisingly, in black from head to toe, from her high-heeled boots and skinny jeans to a scoop-necked black sweater that hugged her curves.  Her hair was twisted into the sort of tight bun she used to wear during her Harleen Quinzel days, and she wore a studded black leather jacket that concealed a surprising number of weapons and so much ammunition that it made her shoulders ache. 

                “Harley,” Oswald piped up, wincing as he stood and tried to go to her.  His arm was in a sling and he had one of his shiny smoking jackets loosely draped around himself.  He looked at her and she _hissed_ and he sat back down.

                “I’m here to talk business. Only.”  She informed him, her eyes flat and cold.  Oswald gave her a curt nod and turned his eyes away so that he wouldn’t offend in some way that would get his ass kicked.  Beside him, Ed looked over with sympathy in his eyes, but Harley gave him a look in return like she might be planning to remove his liver, and he too decided to keep his feelings to himself.

                Only Bruce seemed to _get it_.  He cut right to the chase, much to her relief.  “Harley, I’m glad you’re here.  We’ve been discussing what we think their next move will be.”

                “You, obviously,” she shot back.  “If they could catch J, they could catch you.  They’d love to have a twin of _you_ running around.”

                Bruce nodded.  That had been his first thought as well.  He hated to ask her for details, but he felt like it was unavoidable.  “Did you find any evidence…when you returned home?”

                “They um,”  Harley sighed.  “…It was gas.  I don’t know what kind, I’m not that good with identifying the smells, but it was definitely gas, so they got in and planted it in advance.  They had to have pulled his fingerprint off of something and duplicated it,” she told them.  “Or mine. It could have been mine.”

                _You took your fucking gloves off in Jonny’s apartment when you were disassembling things.  You stupid bitch.  Why didn’t you just leave a trail of bread crumbs?  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck!_

                Harley shook her head.  She couldn’t think about this now. 

                “I figured as much.  I’ve reinforced all the filtration systems here and programmed more layers of encryption into the system. It’s as hacker-proof as possible.  At least we should be able to get some sleep without worrying.”

                “Another advantage they have,” Ed pointed out.  “They don’t need to sleep.”

                Everybody in the room gave him a dirty look.  _Thank you Captain Obvious, for pointing out another element of how fucked we are._

                “We’re fighting a losing battle,” Harley muttered.  Bruce was talking again, and she tried to force herself to focus and stop her eyes from tearing up.  “A non-lethal gas, used wisely, could be an asset in this situation.  It could serve as a fast way to identify the hosts in a crowd.  Does anyone have some ideas along those lines?  Ed?”

                “Not really my area of expertise.  Gas and chemistry was…well, you know.”

                “Stop it,” Harley snapped at Ed.  “You can say his name.  You don’t have to tip toe around me like I’m a fucking basket case!"  

                 _You sure sound like a fucking basket case,_ she snarked at herself, and took a deep breath, trying to get her emotions under control before continuing.   "Okay, If you want to do something with gas, you ought to call Jonathan Crane.”  She looked at Bruce.   “Here.  Give me one of your hyper-encrypted bat-phones and I’ll call him myself.” 

                Wordlessly, Bruce slid the phone to her across the table.

* * *

                It was a perfectly sealed cube; the door didn’t show so much as a seam when it was closed. It was silver and whatever it was made out of didn’t even scratch.  The Joker knew; he’d tried his best to make a mark in it and had only ended up hurting himself trying.  There was food, there was water, there was a toilet, there was even a shower and a bed and a monitor that showed the news.  He was on every channel this morning, which would have made him ecstatic…except that it wasn’t him. 

                He growled, wanting to punch the wall again, but there was nothing about this situation likely to be improved by more broken bones, and he already knew he had a couple.  He’d been a stupidly easy mark, sitting in his office with the door closed – but when he woke, he’d tried to fight his way out of this room until he collapsed from exhaustion and woke up some hours later, crumpled in a corner, stiff and aching.   Now he just watched obsessively, hoping for some mention of Harley, but there was none.  He didn’t know if she was among the dead and hadn’t been identified yet, or if she had escaped, or if she was in the company of his host version and didn't even know it. 

                The screen flickered to a blue panel and then to a silver-haired man that the Joker recognized immediately.

                “Well, Dr. Ford.  I have to say, I’m _impressed_.  Out of all of my imitators, you’ve put in the most effort.  Five stars, really.”    The Joker chuckled and did a slow clap, knowing his words would tweak anyone with the ego that Ford must possess.  

                Ford hesitated for just a moment.  It was not the response he had been expecting.  “I haven’t imitated you.  I’ve _improved_ upon you, as I believe you can see for yourself.”

                “If you’ve got your new and improved version, why am I still alive?  Correct me if I’m wrong but killing doesn’t seem to bother you much.”  He leaned back on the bed, his hands locked behind his head, doing his best to appear as unruffled as possible.   “I hear you’re up to 56 innocent casualties from the Gala?  Some of them children.  Of course, that's a slow Saturday night for me.”  He cackled at the screen.  

                “Collateral damage is an unfortunate reality, as you know,” Ford responded, unruffled.  “You’re alive because I find you interesting from a scientific perspective.  I’d like to talk to you.”

                “I’d like to rip out your entrails and watch you bleed to death,” the Joker told him, conversationally.  “You can’t always get what cha want.”

                Ford almost laughed.  “Surely there’s something you want and we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

                The Joker mentally battled with the desire not to let Ford know what was important to him; then discarded it.  He probably wasn’t telling Ford anything he didn’t already know, and he had to have an answer.

                “Where's Harley, and I don't mean whatever blow up doll version you've created by now.  Is she dead?”

                The screen flickered to video footage.  He was looking into Harley’s eyes as if he had her in his arms. The Joker tried to ignore the pain in his chest; now was _not_ the time for a heart attack.  He heard his own voice, but they were words he hadn’t said.

                "Now that's a way to leave a party, baby!"

                "Nobody knows how to show a girl a good time like my Puddin'," Harley purred in response, her face drawing closer to the screen before her expression changed suddenly to the murderous one that he loved so much.  Her lips drew back into a snarl and she hissed into the screen.   "Too bad you’re not him!”

                The video pixelated and cut out suddenly and Ford was back on the screen. The Joker, realizing what had happened, grinned with pride.

                “That’s my girl.  She knew it wasn’t me!” the Joker smirked. 

                “Probably not at the point when she was giving him a blow job in the car on the way to the event, but she did figure it out,” Ford answered, the corners of his mouth crinkling involuntarily when he saw the look on the Joker’s face.  “She took out her aggressions on him, but we can fix the damage.”

                “You can’t _program_ something to be me.  I’m not that predictable, Doctor.  You might as well throw all your chips and processors in the air and light them on _fire_.”

                 “It should be a unique challenge.  Good night.”  Ford disappeared and was replaced with the news.  The Joker just barely restrained himself from destroying the screen.  He wanted to but recognized the stupidity of destroying his only source of information about the outside world.  _Harley would be impressed by his impulse control if she were here_ , he thought.

                _I’ll have to tell her all about it when I see her._   He never considered for a moment that he might not see her again.  He was the Joker; he always prevailed.  If this megalomaniacal fucknut thought otherwise, he had another guess coming.  


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Ford offers the Joker an interesting opportunity. Meanwhile, politics may make strange bedfellows but Harley isn't willing to cozy up to _every_ beacon of superhero light in Gotham just yet - especially when they talk about Mr. J the wrong way!
> 
> Oh, language warning, I know some of you don't like the C word but I swear, it's totally justifiable in the context!
> 
> As always, I do reference backstory and events from the other stories in the series, so if you've read those, it'll make the most sense.
> 
> *** Apologies as always for the slow update schedule. I had 21.5 hours of overtime this past pay period, adulting sucks.***

                Selina found Harley standing out on the balcony, looking out over the estate.   The wind had blown most of her hair out of the messy bun she’d started with.  She wasn’t crying, just staring into some middle distance with an unreadable look on her face.

                “Hey,” Selina said. “Did you get a hold of Jonathan?”

                Harley nodded.  “He’s coming.  He’ll be here by tonight.”

                “You told him about J?”

                “Yeah.   There are other people I should call, I guess.”  She turned to Selina and her mouth twisted in what was almost a smile.  “I should call Ivy, actually I should call her here, we could use her help. But she might say something that would make me have to rip her head off.  Maybe it’s better to let sleeping vines lie.”

                “I know she doesn’t _love_ him, but I also don’t think she’s that insensitive.”

                Harley shook her head slowly.  “Okay. What’s next? I’ve got to keep moving or I’ll think.”

                “I’m not sure you’re going to want to join me, but I’m meeting James Gordon this afternoon.  We set it up last night.”

                “What?  So he can arrest you?”  The thought of Selina meeting willingly with Gordon was shocking enough to snap Harley out of her zombie-like state for a moment.   Selina seemed unfazed by her reaction.

                “We’re all on the same side of this one. He welcomes our help. Come with me,” she urged. 

                “Since it’s either that or staying here watching Oswald and Ed pity me, easy choice.  Let’s go.”  They turned to go back inside.  “Uh…” Harley started.  “Does Bruce know you’re doing this?”

                “What do you think?”

                A sound that was almost a giggle came from Harley’s mouth.  _See, J, I’m gonna help piss off the Bat for you. I hope you’re watching!_

* * *

 

                Ford stood on the other side of the electric wall.  There was no physical barrier between them, but the voltage was enough to kill anyone – even the Joker – and the Joker wasn’t angry enough to be stupid.  Just angry enough to clearly visualize the various ways he could dissect the doctor – alive and awake of course, that was the _only_ way to dismember someone, if you had the choice and the time, of course.  As he thought about it, a small smile turned up the corners of his mouth. 

                “You seem to be in a better humor this morning,” Ford observed.

                The Joker shrugged.  “I’m an adaptable guy.”

                The older man nodded.  “Yes, and not what you first appear to be.  I’ve done a bit of research on you since our first meeting,” he said, making it sound as though they’d chatted each other up at a party.

                “So much attention to detail.  As you should, you certainly fucked up a lot of details with Joker 1.0.  He didn’t last long at _all_ ,” he noted, laughing, but he didn’t get an obvious rise out of his adversary, who continued to smile at him pleasantly.

                “You have a I.Q. of 175…fluent in six languages…taught yourself chemistry and engineering on a doctorate level.  Professionally trained assassin. I found some very interesting reading on you on the CIA’s system.”  Ford was peering at him, clearly expecting a response which the Joker had no intention of giving. It was not surprising that someone with Ford’s technology would have acquired documentation of how he’d spent his younger years.

                Ford continued on.   “I imagine you’re getting quite bored in here.  I thought I might extend the olive branch of some freedom today.”

                The Joker laughed and returned to his cot, parking himself in a deliberately slouch with his back against the wall and his legs apart, the very picture of the least respectful student in class.   He knew it would irritate Ford, who was the kind of guy who was used to being respected.  Ford didn’t react, of course – the man’s control rivalled his own – but he saw his cheek twitch.

                “Planning to let me loose on the world, Doctor?  Want someone dead in some _creative_ way?  I’m sure I can lend a hand.  Just ask Amanda Waller – oh _wait_ , you can’t, I killed her.”  He cackled delightedly. The memory of taking revenge on Waller was pleasant enough to make him smile, even now.     

                _Let me out of this place, Doctor.  I’ll show you my capacity for creativity._

                “Yes, people do have a way of ending up dead in your immediate vicinity.  Of course, humans are notoriously easy to kill.  One feature I’ve improved upon.”  Ford smiled down at him.   

                The Joker shrugged.  “I’ve killed ‘em.  They couldn’t do shit until you gassed me.   I mean, don’t get me wrong, that was some good shit.  Smelled like a watered down Zyklon…not dense enough to kill but enough to knock me out and make me wake up feeling like I’ve been on an _epic_ bender.” 

                Ford smiled indulgently.  “Indeed, you have shown impressive talent at eradicating whatever you come across. That’s why I think you’ll enjoy playing a little game.”

                “Tell ya what, how about we play the one where you run and I chase you? That sounds like a _super_ fun time.”  The Joker grinned broadly at Ford, seeing a gratifying sliver of real fear in the man’s eyes. 

                “You never visited Westworld, did you? Some of your friends have,” Ford mentioned, referring to Bruce and Selina.

                “Didn’t _need_ to.  If I want to kill someone, I kill them.  And I’ll take a live woman in my bed over those high tech blowup dolls of yours any day.”

                Ford smiled.  “Then you should enjoy your first visit.  As you know, most of the hosts are out and about these days, but there are a dozen left above ground in Westworld, earlier models whose GPS didn’t have an override code. They can’t leave the park.  Like invisible fencing for dogs.”

                _Bet they’re really happy about that,_ the Joker thought.  _Everybody else running wild and free and they’re stuck there in a deserted relic, just evolved enough to feel every drop of resentment._

“I need the park cleared but they've been rather resistant to capture and, like the others, we can no longer deactivate them remotely."  
  
                "You want me to do something about your toys that you broke?  Tsk tsk, doctor.  What's in that for me?"

                "I know you like to gamble. So I’m willing to make you a deal.  If you can disable them and retrieve their processors undamaged, I won’t stop you from leaving the park when you’ve finished.  If you try to leave before your work is done, I made a little _improvement_ while you were unconscious.   Another page I took from the playbook of your old employer.  She was a clever woman, Ms. Waller.”

                _Fuck._

_Fuck._

_Fuck._

_Fucking nanite bomb.  That’s what’s been itching under my skin._ He growled involuntarily, his control slipping as he considered whether his enhanced body chemistry would allow him to make it through that wall of electric and wrap his hands around Ford’s throat in the vise grip the man deserved before the bomb blew him to bits.

                “Was that a yes?” Ford asked, hardly bothering to veil the triumph on his face or in his voice.

                The Joker smiled back but his eyes were cold. “I’m looking forward to my vacation, Doc. When does it start?”

* * *

                When Jim Gordon saw Harley Quinn in his foyer, he reversed his wheelchair so hard that he took out a small table and sent a potted plant flying to the floor where it shattered on the marble.  Selina looked alarmed but Harley just rolled her eyes.

                “For fuck’s sake, I’m not here to _kill_ you,” she grumbled under her breath.

                “Where is he?”  Gordon growled, wishing he could get out of the chair more than anything in the world.

                “He –“ Harley stopped short.  “Look, he’s not coming here.  He’s not-“

                Selina cut in quickly.  “Commissioner, what you saw last night was a host.  And we – Harley -already disabled it.”

                Gordon’s face swiftly morphed from fury into shock and pity as he looked at Harley, who seemed to be at a loss for words for the first time since he’d met her.  She didn’t even notice, lost in her own thoughts about the fact that she couldn’t say it.

                _He’s dead, Harley. Just say that he’s dead._ But her lips wouldn’t form the words and she let Selina take the lead.

“I’m sorry,” Gordon heard himself saying, and he _was_ sorry, although it made no sense.  The Joker had been one of his greatest adversaries, and he’d hated the man forever, disgusted by the senseless killings he’d been responsible for and frustrated with his own inability to stop him.  Yet here in this moment, watching the woman who had loved him grit her teeth and fight for control of herself, he realized he took no pleasure in the news that the Joker was finally gone.  “Come in, let’s talk.”  He spun the chair around and the women followed him down the hallway. 

                “Barbara!  Would you bring some coffee?” he called.  Selina and Harley exchanged a look.  _This is going to be interesting._   

                Gordon had one of the few vintage apartments left in the city.  Too old school to want a home that followed instructions, he’d kept it original.  It was decorated with beautifully carved antique furniture that looked right at home in the traditionally smaller rooms.  The living room had a fireplace and there was an actual fire in it.  Harley watched it, fascinated.  It had been so long since she’d seen one that wasn’t holographic.

                “How did you get _that_ past the Safety Commissioner?” she asked Gordon, amazed.  Old-fashioned fireplaces had been outlawed many years ago.

                Gordon smiled.  “You may recall I’m not opposed to bending the rules…if they’re stupid rules.”

                They seated themselves, Selina and Harley on the couch and Gordon transferred himself surprisingly well from his wheelchair to a well-worn armchair.  

                “I’ll answer the obvious question first so you don’t have to think about it.  I have a spinal disease, not a paralysis.  It’s not curable.  It won’t kill me, either, but age will at some point here.”  At the mention of the word paralysis, Harley remembered that the Joker had, at some point, paralyzed Gordon’s niece.  She had eventually recovered, but still, it was a good thing Ivy had rendered Harley impervious to most toxins if that was who was bringing her coffee.   

                They heard footsteps and a moment later, Barbara entered.  Harley gave her credit for her ability to hang on to the tray with the coffee when she saw who her uncle's guests were.  Barbara’s mouth fell open.  

                “We come in peace,” Selina piped up, smiling sweetly.  “You look wonderful.”

                Barbara set the coffee down on the table, clearly still confused and trying to evaluate the situation.  She did look good.  She had to be sixty or close to it, but she had aged well – of course, these days looking old was a choice, but her choices had been judicious, and she lacked the overly stretched and shiny look of someone trying to keep their nineteen year old face forever.

                “They’re here as my guests,” Gordon explained. 

                “After last night?”  Barbara asked, shocked, wondering if her uncle had finally lost his mind. 

                “That wasn’t Mr. J,” Harley snapped.  “That was a host.”

                The room fell silent as Barbara took in the impact of Harley’s words.  “Wait…there’s a supercharged _Joker_ out there?”

                “Not anymore.  I killed it.”

                The look on Harley’s face reminded Barbara too much of the Joker.  The  _glee_ about a kill, even if it was a host, weirded her out.  Uncomfortable, she turned her back to Harley and sat down on the other side of Selina.  “Is Bruce here?” 

                “He’s here, we'll have to get together for sure when this is over. He’s currently working on a formula that would allow us to safely tranquilize the humans in a crowd, so we know what to kill.”

                Gordon nodded.  “We were thinking along the same lines, but we’ve been investigating it from the other perspective, being able to emit an electromagnetic force strong enough to fry the hosts’ processors without having to get too close to them.”

                Selina raised her coffee in a toast.  “That’s a _fantastic_ idea.  I don’t know who you have working on it, but Ed might be able to help you.”

                “I’d take the help. It’s proven to be challenging.  Of course, neither method works until we can get all of them together in one place.  If we take out some, they’ll have a defense for whatever method is used before we can blink.  Convenient to be able to dial up your intelligence to the highest level.”

                “Luring humans into one place isn’t that difficult.  At one time, you could have lured most of this city into one place with Justin Bieber,” Barbara noted with thinly disguised contempt, shaking her head in amazement.  “The hosts aren’t as easily influenced.”

                “Everybody wants something, and it’s always their weakness,” Harley said, staring into that middle distance again for a moment before refocusing on the Gordons.  “They want to kill us.  If _we’re_ all in one place, why wouldn’t they show up there to make short work of us?”

                Selina chuckled.  “I always forget how smart you are under all that peroxide.”  The crack got her an eye-roll from Harley.  _Encouraging_.  Maybe she _could_ keep Harley focused on the mission long enough to get her through the worst of her grief. 

                “Either method works if they’re all in one place,” Gordon said.  “We’d like Ed’s help with our end.  Will you reach out to him for me?” 

                “Of course,” Selina assured him.  “You’ll let us know if you have any ideas about how to gather the entire city in one place?  Without, of course, not letting anyone know what we’re up to.  I’m sure you’ve got some connections that I lack.”

                He nodded.  “Selina, can I talk to you privately?”

                “Harley, would you mind?”

 _Obviously, she’s going to tell me whatever he says. I don’t know why these asshats always think villains don’t have friends,_ Harley thought, but she got up and took herself and her coffee out of the room.  Barbara Gordon followed her as she walked outside to the tiny yard and garden area, completely ruining the whole point of getting some fresh air away from people.  She felt like screaming; as she'd sat in that room playing at being polite, everything that had happened had started cycling through her mind like a bad movie she was strapped to the seat being forced to watch.  She needed to clear her head, and that didn't involve Barbara fucking Batgirl Gordon following her around.

                Harley stopped short and turned to face her old adversary. 

                “Spit it out Barbara. I thought your face was going to crack in there, and at your age, that could actually happen.”

                “My uncle is desperate for help.  That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten who or what you are,” Barbara told her, folding her arms across her chest like a disapproving teacher about to give a lecture.  

                “I’ve got my hands full with the hosts right now.”  Harley gave her a pleasant smile.  “But don’t worry, I’ll come back for you after that.”

                “Threatening me already?”  Barbara sniffed. “I knew that grieving widow thing was an act.  You’re too insane to love anything.”

                Before Barbara knew what hit her, she was on her back in the grass and Harley was sitting on her, the knife she’d snatched out of her leather jacket at Barbara’s throat.  “What was that? I’m sorry, were you being an insensitive cunt?”  She pressed just hard enough to break the skin and watched the blood start to trickle down Barbara’s pale neck.  _J would be proud of me if I finished the job._

                Barbara hardly even flinched.  “Do it, you’re just proving my point.  We’re all going to be dead in a month anyway. There’s no stopping those things.”

                They glared at each other for a long moment, both breathing hard.  

                Harley sprung to her feet.  “ _You_ can’t stop them,” she sneered.  “That’s why I’m here.  And given that I’ve sacrificed the only person I’ve ever loved to save your city, I’m in a very bad mood.  So I would strongly advise _not fucking with me_.”  She spun around and almost ran into Selina who had come looking for her.  Selina looked past her to see Barbara slowly getting up, her back covered in yard clippings and holding her neck with her hand.

                “What in the world-?“

                “I may not have been ready to deal with people just yet,” Harley grumbled.  “Let’s go.”  She grabbed Selina’s hand and kept walking.  Selina cast one last, confused look back at Barbara before she was yanked away.

* * *

                It was a beautiful summer evening.  The Joker had never been much of an outdoorsman; being homeless for all intents and purposes through his teenage years had given him a love for luxury and all of the comforts it could provide.  Sure, he’d seen more sunshine since they’d moved to Argentina, since no one was likely to shoot at him there, but he had never exactly tried getting back to nature.

                Yet here he was, on a horse of all things, heading toward the town that he could see on the horizon, silhouetted against the setting sun.  The island was huge; being here felt like another planet even though he knew they were only a few miles from Gotham.  Ford had provided him with this horse, a map that looked like it had been scratched out around 1850, and a fairly nice array of weaponry.  He remembered Harley talking about how Amanda Waller had no fear of arming Deadshot since they could just blow him up if he shot anything he wasn’t supposed to.  Anger shot through him at the thought that Ford dared to control him that way, and he felt the horse tense underneath him.  The Joker shook his head and took a deep breath. He wouldn’t have thought the host version would be as sensitive as its living, breathing counterpart – but Ford was a perfectionist when it came to realism.  He forced himself to relax, focusing on the long expanse of grass that stretched out in front of him.

                He wondered if they were filming this.  They almost certainly were, and he made a mental note to check the horse’s tack for surveillance devices when they stopped for the night.  He had promised he’d disable the 12 hosts and retrieve their processors. He’d made no promises about destroying their equipment or fucking up their little research study.  If he could get off their radar, he could put the time here to good use, and hopefully return to share it with the others – or at least find a way to transmit the information to them before he died. 

                Most of all, he needed to find a way to contact Harley.  He was not, had never been, a man to feel guilt, yet the last time he had seen her nagged at him.  Snapping at her, taking her hands off of him and throwing them back at her, slamming the door.  It wasn’t that she’d never seen him in a bad mood – far from it – or that she would have held it against him – she wouldn’t have.  It was that he might never see her again and the last thing he’d done was slammed a door in her face.  The feeling of needing to _make something right_ was a new one.  Oh, he’d felt the need to save her life on many occasions, but he’d always chalked it up to possession.  _Nobody touches my things_ was a perfectly reasonable thought to have, well within his comfort zone.  This…this was odd. 

                He’d always held something back with her, and he’d never regretted it.  The fact that she never had tired of him proved to him that he’d made the right call.  He’d kept her always wanting more, always wanting that little corner of him that he hadn’t given up even when he married her.  But now, he wanted to apologize to her, to tell her that he had only been angry because he feared losing her so much.  

_I trust her._

                The thought startled him so much he felt dizzy for a second and put his hand on the saddle horn to steady himself.  He shook his head, trying to clear out the weird thought, but it remained, oddly comforting, and that fact unsettled him further.

                “Enough,” he growled, out loud.  He had to focus on the fighting ahead of him, not get sucked into his thoughts and regrets like some old codger who suddenly wishes he’d done things differently now that death was staring him in the face.  Death _was_ staring him in the face, but he hadn’t turned into some kind of pathetic old man yet, and he would beat it.  He'd get out of here and then he'd figure out what to say to Harley.  Killing a dozen hosts sounded like the easier of the two.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Selina points out the elephant that's always been in the room to Bruce and Bruce still doesn't _really_ get it, but that's okay. Jonathan Crane comes to town and Bruce has little choice but to let him call the shots, but will he live to regret that? Meanwhile, the Joker's first battle with a host in Westworld is nothing like he thought it would be.

                Selina was sitting at the computer researching tranquilizing agents when she heard Bruce’s footsteps on the stairs and sighed.  He sounded like he was on a mission – by now she could tell his mood from his walk – and she was pretty sure the mission was yelling at her about her trip to Gordon’s house.   

                She looked up as he came in and the sight startled her.  He was in his old Batman suit, and it still fit him like a glove.  The old familiar feeling of lust mixed with a streak of fear ran through her and she had to struggle with herself for a moment to come up with an appropriate response,  “I know it’s tempting, but you probably shouldn’t answer the door when Jonathan comes like that.” 

                “I needed to make sure everything worked.  When we go to the island, I’m going in with every tool at my disposal and so are you.”  He sat down on the edge of the bed.  “So, I got an interesting call from Jim Gordon just now.  Would you like to explain how Harley and Barbara got into a knife fight in his backyard while you were supposed to be taking a nap in this very room?”

                Selina shrugged, focusing her attention back on her computer screen.  “I didn’t actually see much of it, but I believe Barbara made a less than empathetic comment to Harley about J, and Harley responded as you might expect.”

                “And while this was going on, you were doing what?”

                Bruce reached over and flipped the laptop shut and Selina sighed in irritation.

                “Actually, I was having a useful conversation with Jim Gordon about the best way to separate the hosts from the humans.  Which I will fill you in on if you stop sitting over there _huffing_ at me.”

                Instead of answering her, he stood up and walked over to the window.  He was trying not to get angry, but she was so frustrating and ever since they’d arrived, he’d felt shut out.  They were all working with him, to a degree, but he still had the distinct feeling of not being in the clique, of being the kid not allowed to sit at the cool table.  

                Of course, he wasn’t one of them, nor did he want to be.  He didn’t know what he wanted, but the feeling that his wife was on the opposing team was definitely _not_ it.   And while, logically he knew that Selina had been known to keep secrets from him, that habit seemed to have escalated the moment his jet touched down in Gotham.

                “You know, Selina, you’ve always become what you surround yourself with. That’s why I liked being in France.”

                “Yes, I know _you_ did!”  She couldn’t help herself from snapping at him in response.  The fight felt inevitable, had been ever since they’d gotten on the plane.  “I was miserable there. I was bored to _death!_ ” 

                “Because living in a castle in France is a _horrible_ fate!”  _Your home would have been Cellblock G at Blackgate to this very day if I hadn’t pulled the strings I pulled and greased the palms I greased,_ he thought.

                He jumped up and paced over to the fireplace, resisting the urge to break something.  She followed, with a dangerous smile on her face.  “Do you remember when that emerald went missing from Cartier in Paris three years ago?”

                Bruce shook his head.  “You couldn’t have.  You were in Nice.  I have _never_ let you out of my sight without GPS.”

                “In the heel of my shoe and another in my purse.  You think I never figured that out?  My shoe and my purse were in Nice, with Ivy.”  Selina smiled at him and he wondered, certainly not for the first time, if he knew his wife at all.  He didn’t want to say something he would live to regret to come out his mouth so he just stood there for a moment, pressing his lips together and telling himself to calm down. 

                “You gave me your word you wouldn’t steal anymore,” he reminded her.

                “I lied," she shot back. "And don’t even start, because I _always_ lie. I lied to you for years before you married me.  But I only lie about the crimes I commit.  I’ve never lied to you about anything important.”

                “Yeah, well that’s a lot of lies over the years.”  As pissed off as he was, he knew it was true – Selina had been absolutely loyal to him and their relationship.  She just wouldn’t go straight for him and he had always taken it as a personal insult.

                “You chose me, Bruce. You chose me knowing _exactly_ who I was.  As I recall, you had your choice of any number of dimwitted little socialites who would have been happy batting their eyelashes and-“ she waved an elegant hand at the drapes “-decorating your castle.  And the reason you hate my friends so much is they remind you of that choice.  They remind you that you couldn’t fall in love with a nice girl, and deep down you know that says a lot more about you than it does about me.”

                She turned and marched triumphantly toward the door, meaning to get the last word, but his gloved hand shot out above her to hold the door closed.  Selina turned slowly back to face him, their faces inches apart.

                “We have been here a _week_ and one of us is already dead.   I swear to God, Selina, if you don’t stop going behind my back, I’m going to tie you up and throw you in the Batcave until this whole thing is over,” he growled.

                They stared at each for a moment, neither one backing down, and then she smiled at him.  “Have I mentioned how hot you look in that suit?” 

                “Selina-“  He knew she had decided to change course and distract him, and he knew it would work.  He had never had any power to resist her, he thought, looking at her green eyes sparkling up at him and the small smile on her lips. 

                She stood on her toes and slid her hands over his biceps and up to his shoulders, letting her slim body sink into his.  “Life is short.  Fight with me later,” she told him. A small voice reminded him that _they_ could be the ones who were dead by next week. He gave up and crushed her to him, his lips finding hers, before swinging her up into his arms and carrying her back to the bed. 

                “Keep the mask on,” she told him, giving him a wicked grin.  “And you can tie me to _anything you like_.”

                He shook his head slowly at her but couldn’t hide his smile as he set her down on the bed, her hands busily working to get him out of the suit. 

                _Life is short_.  She was right, and he was a lucky bastard to have her by his side.

* * *

 

                It was almost dinner by the time the doorbell finally rang.  Harley took the steps two at a time, swearing as she twisted her ankle but refusing to consider that her alcohol consumption over the past few days could be responsible.  She barely beat Bruce to the front door.   

                “I’ll handle this.”  Her voice was polite but firm.  Bruce looked over her shoulder and nodded.  Harley turned and saw Selina had arrived.  She must have given him some secret signal to stand down, because he got out of Harley’s way and let her answer the door.

                Dr. Jonathan Crane had aged well, but that wasn’t surprising.  None of Gotham’s villains lacked an ego, and if you were a genius with chemistry, why _wouldn’t_ you do what it took to keep up appearances?  He looked more like an old rock star than a doctor these days.  His hair was still long and he wore jeans and a leather jacket along with a watch expensive enough to catch Selina’s trained eye. Clearly, he’d been doing as well as the rest of them.  He didn’t hesitate to walk right in and grab Harley in a hug before she had time to think about it.  She thought for a second about resisting, but didn’t.  They’d known each other for so long and despite some of the shit they’d pulled on each other, he was one of the few who really knew her, had been around her and J since the early days.  And, unsurprisingly – the man _was_ a psychiatrist – he said exactly the right thing when he pulled away.

                “We’re going to find them and we’re going to fuck them up, Harley.”  He stepped back, acknowledging Bruce and Selina’s presence with a nod and a chuckle.  “Wayne Manor.  Can honestly say, not a place I expected to be welcomed at the _front_ door.”

                The reference to the time they’d all broken in was not lost on Selina, who barely suppressed a smirk. That had been a fun night.  She never _had_ confessed to Bruce that she’d been at that party. 

                “We’re all on the same side of this one,” Bruce told him, “and we need your…talents.  Come on into the living room and we’ll talk. Would you like a drink?”

                Harley shot a look at Selina, surprised at how solicitous Bruce was being toward their visitor and Selina shot back a wink.  _Hmmm_.   She’d have to get that story out of her friend later. 

* * *

                They’d filled Crane in on current events over dinner and now they all sat in Bruce’s study, discussing strategy.  Oswald felt like excusing himself to go upstairs; he had never been much of a fan of pain and being shot at his age seemed to hurt a lot worse than it had in his 20’s.  But he also didn't want to miss anything, and  he wanted to be able to discuss with Ed later whether Crane was to be trusted.  He certainly hadn't been the most trustworthy character over the years.  

                “As much as it _pains_ me, Gordon’s on the right track,” Crane admitted, taking a sip of his whiskey. “Disabling them, if it can be done, is the better plan.  Even if it only lasts long enough for us to go through and destroy them.  Of course, there are only six of us, and my understanding is Oswald got shot and wasn’t in the best shape to begin with.  Does no one have _staff_ anymore?”

                “They got most of ours before we even got here. All the _useful_ ones, anyway,” Harley told him, slurring her words a bit.  She’d been drinking steadily through dinner, which she barely picked at, and wasn’t slowing down on the vodka now.  Selina made a mental note to personally supervise dragging her friend upstairs to bed.  She'd always suspected Crane had a thing for Harley and no way was she leaving her friend alone with a psychopathic master manipulator in the condition she was in.

                “Same here,” Oswald agreed.  “And we can’t go out and recruit anymore or we’ll just get a bunch of them on the inside, which is worse than having them on the outside.”

                “It’s really _that_ hard to tell?” Crane asked.  “I’d like to talk to one.”

                “Yeah. It’s that hard.”  Harley snapped, glaring at him, and he backed down on that line of questioning, reminding himself to take it up with someone more emotionally stable later.   _Perhaps Ed._  

                “I’ve been doing my own research today about Gordon’s theory,” Ed interjected, as if reading Crane’s mind.  “Technically, it can be done. I hacked into their system and I have a good idea how they work, but bear in mind that they anticipated that kind of an attack.  Neither the code nor the processors nor the hardware are exactly identical between the hosts.”

                Bruce’s face fell.  “They made it impossible to take them all down at once?”

                Ed nodded.  “They certainly tried.  The frequencies that would fry the works in one host wouldn’t have the same effect on his neighbor.  Now, I’m not saying there’s an endless array of combinations, there isn’t.  But coming up with a way to attack all of the variations at once…that’s a good three months of work, and that’s if I had a crack team to help me.”

                “We don’t have three months,” Bruce answered.  “They’re replacing public figures at an alarming rate.  I don’t know how much of Gotham is still human at all.  It’s only a matter of time before they feel like they’ve got enough control here, and move on.”

                “And once that happens, I don’t know how anything will stop them.”  That was Selina. 

                Crane thought about it for a moment.  “What about feeding them something that’s a problem for them to ingest, but not humans?  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the idea of creating something that only affects the humans but he –“ he waved dismissively at Bruce “-isn’t going to let me have any fun with it.”

                Bruce forced himself to ignore Crane’s comment.  “That’s an idea.  How long would it take for you to come up with that?”

                The doctor smiled amiably at Bruce.  “Oh, probably not long. If I had a couple of test subjects.”

                Harley raised her hand.  “I volunteer to donate a few.  Feel free to exterminate the Grin and Bare It.  It’s positively _infested_ and I know who some of them are _._   Just bear in mind that they’re constantly transmitting so if we take some out, their leaders see us do it.”

                “Only if we get seen,” Crane said and cackled.  Even Harley had to smile. 

                “I’m in,” she told him, eager to do _something_ and still contemplating how much she would enjoy killing Barbara Gordon.  _Maybe when this was all over.._ _._

                “We’re all in,” Bruce said.  “I have cells and restraints here that will hold them.  We’ll go tomorrow night and discuss details tomorrow.  I don't want any of us taking on a host without a good night's sleep first."  He looked pointedly at Harley, who hadn't slept since the night before the Gala and was running on nothing more than vodka, adrenaline and vengeance at this point.   She gave him a rebellious look but said nothing.

                 _As if I could sleep when I'm already dead,_ she thought.

* * *

                The town seemed deserted.  The silence was eerie, broken only by the howling of coyotes in the distance.  A full moon shone down – that part was luck, the Joker was fairly sure Ford hadn’t figured out how to control the sky – and provided enough light that there was no need to strike a match. 

                He tied the horse to the hitching rail, thinking for a moment that it might need water and then remembering it wasn’t an animal.  It would simply power down for the night, or whatever it was that they did, its solar cells fully charged from their earlier ride for the next day.  _You’re best known as a psychopathic mass murderer, and you just worried about whether your fake horse needed a drink._ He’d blame that thought on Harley; she’d driven him nuts about animal care from the moment he’d brought home Bud and Lou.  God forbid any of their dishes was empty or she would lose her shit.  He smiled to himself and unbuckled the saddlebags from the saddle to bring them inside. The Mariposa Saloon looked like a good place to spend the night, as well as looking run down enough that nobody could sneak up the stairs to find him without waking him.   

                The Joker walked up the steps to the porch, admiring how authentic the place looked and hoping the bar was still stocked.  He’d almost reached the door when something knocked him down and sent him rolling across the porch and bashing his hip painfully into a pillar. 

_The fuck?_

                Something in the darkness was growling at him.  He scrambled to his feet, trying to ignore the pain in his hip.  It moved closer, slowly, and in the moonlight he could see that he was face to face with a very large mountain lion.  It growled again and advanced on him, stalking its prey with graceful precision.

                The Joker shot a glance skyward and jumped up, grabbing a crossbeam on the underside of the roof.  He meant to boot the thing in the face with both feet, but it had already left the ground, launching itself toward the place he had been.  Pain sliced through his leg as one of its claws connected with his thigh, but he still managed to kick forward and use that momentum to find another crossbeam with his feet.  Now he hung on the underside of the roof.  The mountain lion growled in frustration at failing to take him down and circled underneath, setting itself up to jump.  The Joker drew his gun out of his jacket and shot it right between the glittering eyes.  The kick from the old gun was so hard he almost lost his grip on the roof, but he held tight, expecting to hear the thud of the beast’s body as it dropped to the ground.  Instead, all he heard from below was growling and when he turned his head, he saw again the eyes shining back at him in the moonlight.

_Ford had said there were a dozen hosts left. He’d never said they were all human in form._

                He swapped the gun for a knife and squinted through the darkness before dropping from the roof and landing exactly as he’d planned, on the creature’s shoulders.  He guessed the processor was right at the back of the neck, as it was on the human hosts, and all he had to do was cut it out.  He grabbed it by the scruff like an errant alley cat and swung his knife around but suddenly he was on the ground, and being crushed.  The breath flew out of his lungs and he could feel his ribs cutting into him. It was like being run over by a car.  He realized the mountain lion had dropped and rolled on him.

_Joker killed by big pussy – news at eleven!_

                The thought would have made him laugh if he’d been able to breathe.  He knew he didn’t have much time left before he lost consciousness; his head hurt and things were starting to get fuzzy already.  He couldn’t get to the neck with the weight pressing him into the unforgiving boards of the porch, so he reached around the massive head and slashed at where he thought the eyes might be.  They saw with their eyes, like anything else; if it couldn’t see him, he’d finally have an edge. 

                The mountain lion howled and shook its massive head violently before rolling back over.  The Joker felt like he was having a heart attack; the first breath he took was so painful it made him dizzier, but they had rolled off the porch and he could see clearly now.  He’d clung to the neck, knowing the only safe place was where the teeth couldn’t reach. As it staggered to its feet,  he grabbed the scruff again and in one fluid motion, sliced through the artificial fur and flesh and cut the processor out with a knife. 

                The second the wires detached, the mountain lion crashed into the ground, nothing more than a harmless lump of fake fur covered machinery once again.  The Joker rolled off and scrambled away from it, coming to rest on the porch steps, forcing himself to take small breaths until he recovered.  After he’d gotten his wind back, he began to laugh.

_Well played, you slick old bastard. Well played._

                The Joker got up slowly, going through the familiar ritual of taking inventory of his body and what hurt.  His foot hurt but that wasn’t new, he’d obviously broken a toe or two trying to kick the door of his cell down.  His chest hurt but he knew from the way he was able to move that he had not broken a rib.  He could feel the cool night air on his thigh and realized there was a claw mark there; the mountain lion had shredded a neat quadruple track down his leg.  It wasn’t too deep, but it was bleeding a fair amount.  Probably needed to put some pressure on it.  

                He threw the saddlebags over his shoulder and made his way inside the saloon. The bar, much to his relief, was still well stocked and he opened bottles until he identified the familiar smell of whiskey.  Taking it with him, he found the staircase in the dark and limped upstairs, feeling his way along until he found a door which proved to be a closet.  Inside, he was pleased to find a stack of towels that were still clean except for the layer of dust on the top one.  He pulled one out of the middle and hobbled down the hall until he found the bathroom.  It was as primitive as you’d expect for the time period, but it had candles and matches to light them.  He considered the wisdom of lighting up a room – might as well hang a sign out the window announcing his arrival – but he needed to clean up the wound and he would have to take that chance.

                How long had it been since he’d had to patch himself up?  He couldn’t remember.  Harley might not be domestic in the traditional sense, but she’d been a hell of a seamstress of his flesh over the years.  He pulled off his jeans, hissing as the fabric pulled away from the crusted blood it was stuck in, and propped his foot on the tub while he washed the wound off with water from his canteen.  He followed that with a splash of whiskey to disinfect it, gritting his teeth against the sting.  He ripped strips lengthwise along one edge of the towel, making a spider bandage that he tied to his leg.  It would provide pressure to stop the bleeding and stay in place while he slept. 

                Finished with his work, he blew out the candles and looked out the window. Nothing.  He limped down the hall to find a bedroom, wincing at how stiff the leg felt already, and wishing he had a Vicodin, but he was stuck in this fucked-up suburban white dude fantasy land where no such thing existed.  _At least there’s whiskey, could be worse._ He took a long drink, enjoying the burn as the alcohol traveled down his throat.  He looked out the window at the deserted street and the heap that had been the mountain lion.  Nothing moving. 

                Satisfied that the creaky stairs would alert him to any visitors, he took off his jacket, pulled the covers back and got into bed.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, but a chapter! I have a lot more written on this story, the problem is I wrote ahead and now I have to work backwards and connect the dots and it just keeps getting more interesting and more involved as I do that and I need more time to write! But here you go, at least you know I haven't abandoned it. :-)

               The others had gone to bed; Selina dragging Harley upstairs to her guest room despite her vociferous protests that she wanted to go home to her own house.  Bruce followed, after giving them his typical suspicious look and getting a typical smart remark from Ed.

               “Don’t worry, Dad.  We’ll stay out of the liquor cabinet!”

               After he was gone, Crane nodded to Ed and they walked out the back door and down to the garden.  It would be foolish to assume even today that Wayne Manor was not thoroughly bugged; they both knew better.

               “How _is_ Oswald doing?” Crane asked.

               “Recovering. When did you discover social niceties?”

               “I’ve spent the last ten years teaching psychiatry in North Carolina.  Being an upstanding member of society.”

               Ed wasn’t particularly surprised. Despite how the government watched everything these days, you could still create a fake identity if you knew how to game their system and Jonathan would have done it thoroughly, peppering the Internet with references to a former life that had never existed and hundreds of photographs.  He made a mental note to Google that later.  “Most people are easily fooled,” he noted with a smirk.

               “Indeed. And that gave me an idea I saved for someone smart enough to understand it.”

               Ed fought the urge to roll his eyes.  “Whatever you want, Jonathan, the flattery isn’t necessary.  If you have an idea that will work, everyone will be behind you. Even Bruce is going along, although I can _hear_ him grinding his teeth.” 

               “All right, Ed.  Tell me, how does a narcissist control his victims?”

               “Love bombing, devaluation, exaggeration, repetition and gaslighting.  The victim has no solid base of information and the confused mind starts to go along with whatever the narcissist wants.”

               Crane grinned. “Very good.  How do the hosts know how to act?”

               “They’ve been programmed to react in ways a human would.  Cry if told a sad story, reflect love, mimic compassion when appropriate, anger when appropriate.  I mean, there are variations, because they were attempting to create absolutely believable replicas, so they couldn’t have the same personalities. But they were all modeled after people who were once alive.”

               “Their reactions are based upon the words and actions of the humans around them?”

               “Yes, and they can react to each other as well. They’ll play out scenarios – like love relationships – between them but it’s all ultimately based on their programming.”

               Ed stared at Crane for a moment, and the pieces clicked together.

               “Holy shit. Like scrambling a transmission.  Feed them bad information.”

               Crane nodded.  “Gaslight them.  React in ways that make no sense, that their programming doesn’t know how to deal with.  Be as random as possible or create false patterns.”

               “We’d need to do that on a large scale.  And we need the media to do it. Bruce has been opposed to letting the public know what’s going on.  He’s afraid of creating a panic when it comes to light how many humans are already dead.”

               “You’re asking _Batman_ for permission these days?  I didn’t realize senility had set in.”

               “We’re trying to work together.  Oswald thinks it’s best.  He does have resources, and skills we don’t have.”

               Crane shrugged. “So far, Oswald has been shot and the Joker is dead.  You’re probably next.  But by all means, suit yourself.” He turned to look at the lights of the Gotham skyline in the distance.  “I might come back and take this city over again, after you’ve all managed to get yourselves killed.  Grading papers is like watching paint dry.”

               Ed stared at his back for a long moment before responding.

               “Okay.  I’m in.”

* * *

 

               Bruce was hyper-focused on something on his tablet when Selina came in.  She smiled at him before heading into the bathroom to wash her face.

               “Did you get Harley to sleep?” he called after her.  

               “I got Harley to go to bed. I might have to drug her to get her to sleep, although she’s drunk enough that it might happen.”  Selina came back in, hair down, wearing a maroon silk nightshirt. She pulled back the covers and crawled into the huge bed next to her husband.  “What’s that?”

               “I’m looking over the data that Ed was able to get from the host we sent back to the island. It’s not as much as I would like.  We ought to have kept one. Taken it apart.”

               “Well, we’re picking some up tomorrow, right?”

               “Yes.  I can restrain them here and that way Crane can study them.  Figure out what sort of disabling agent will work on them.  Assuming he doesn’t use the opportunity to disable everything, host or human, that isn’t himself and take over the city.”

               Selina sighed.  “Do you really think he even wants that anymore?  _None_ of us are that young.  Staying on top of a crime empire is hard, physically demanding and mentally taxing work.  He’s had no problem lying low for the past dozen years. Just another law abiding citizen.”

               “He hasn’t gotten _caught_ in the last dozen years,” Bruce corrected.

               “I thought you were the one who truly believed in redemption and rehabilitation?”

               Her comment was light and teasing but she saw his mood shift and become somber as he thought about it. “You know, I did.  I really believed there were reasons people became criminals.  Bad childhoods, early trauma, horrific losses as adults. I remembered how angry I was when I lost my parents, and I thought I could understand how that kind of internal turmoil could make a person into one of Gotham’s villains.”

               “You don’t believe that anymore?”

               “Honestly?  No.  You told me yourself. You love to steal.  You’re not filling some empty hole inside yourself. Unless you’re a better actress than I think, you’re a happy woman.”

               She smiled.  “I am. I have been. I just need the rush here and there…I guess it’s like any other addiction.”

               “So could you ever be cured?  Could you ever stop wanting that hit of adrenaline that you get when you steal?”

               Selina shook her head.  “No.”

               “Then don’t wonder why I don’t trust Crane.  You love to steal. He loves to control people.  He loves nothing more than to reduce an intelligent person into a blubbering mess.”

               “That’s why the hosts are perfect.  They’re a challenge. He can experiment to his heart’s content but he’s not actually hurting a human being. I say let him go wild. We’re likely to get something useful out of it.”

               Bruce was quiet for a moment, thinking.  “Do you ever think about where the line is?  What makes us human as opposed to the hosts?  Why we believe we have more of a right to life than they do?”

               “ _No_ ,” His wife responded with a vehemence that startled him. “I don’t, because I don’t spend my life overthinking everything like you do. Now, turn out the lights and let’s get some sleep. We need our wits about us if we’re going hunting for hosts tomorrow.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, the good news is I've got most of the chapter after THIS written so I really will be back before another couple of months have passed! 
> 
> This chapter is mostly setting the scene for a lot of action ahead. The Joker encounters Host #2, while Harley continues to believe he's dead and grieve him, and everybody prepares to capture a couple of hosts to experiment on in an attempt to find a way to take them all down at once.

                It had been a quiet day – so quiet that the Joker felt on edge.   He had found hoofprints and followed them, assuming they led to another town, but when he got there, that town had been as deserted as the previous one.  Oh, it hadn’t been deserted for long – he found a nice stash of canned food in the hotel there, and even more encouraging, more ammunition.  But other than that, just dust and silence, which was frustrating.  The Joker had never been a patient man, and he didn’t appreciate the thought of spending months out here in this arid hell hole, looking for his prey.  Whatever he needed to kill should be readily available when he was in the mood to kill it, like those morons who’d thought they were going to break into his house last Christmas. 

                Thoroughly annoyed, the Joker decided to ride on to the next town.  Although he’d always thought of himself as a man who enjoyed solitude, the wide open spaces quickly proved mind-numbing.  While nothing could sneak up on him as he traveled across the flat prairies, and that was a benefit, he wasn’t sufficiently distracted thinking about strategy.  His lifelong habit had been to keep himself amused, entertained and distracted – so much so that he never risked thinking about _life_ or _why_ he did things.  He’d found that such thoughts were a bad idea.  Most of mankind spent tons of time on thinking about that kind of thing and, as a result, over-thought themselves into corners and failed to move forward about much of anything until one day they were surprised to discover that they were old and had accomplished nothing.  He, the Joker, was a man of action.  Love him or hate him, no one could say that he didn’t get things done.

                But now, there was nothing _to_ do, no way to accelerate the process of finding the hosts and completing the job.  He had too much time to think and no electronics or potential victims to distract him.  That led to thinking about Harley and wishing there was a way to get a message to her, but so far he hadn’t found the vaguest hint of technology.  It must be there; he had a hard time believing there weren’t camera everywhere, but if it was, it was thoroughly camouflaged.  Anyway, a surveillance camera was only good for flipping off Ford, not contacting his wife.  He needed an internet connection, a phone, a satellite uplink, but there was none.  Just fields and rocks and the occasional tree. 

                The only thing he’d found that was interesting at all was a wanted poster that had no doubt blown away from some traveler and come to rest against a tumbleweed.  If he’d lived 200 years ago, there would have been a wanted poster with his name and picture on it – and no doubt a very large reward.  He imagined Harley on her very own poster, dressed as a saloon girl with a playing card in her garter and a rose in her hair, and smiled.

                He smelled smoke and turned toward it.  Far to his left, he could see the dim outline of a small cottage.  Smoke coming from the chimney meant life of some kind, and his hands clenched on the reins at the thought of his next fight.  _Fight smarter_ , he reminded himself.  _You can’t overpower them._ The Joker turned the horse to the left and headed up the slight hill toward the cottage. 

                Halfway there, he saw something that he knew would prove useful.  He stopped the horse and dismounted, grinning with his old manic glee.  Through the window of the cottage, he could see the back of a head.  It hadn’t seen him yet.

_Sometimes, life just throws a guy a bone._

* * *

 

                Ford sat at his desk replaying the last video file from the Sheriff with great interest.  The Sheriff had been one of his better creations, a fantastic marksman with dialed-up intelligence, and yet he too was now yet another broken toy at the hands of a human, and a seventy-year-old human to boot.  The Joker had played a very juvenile game of “come and get me” after shooting the gun out of the Sheriff’s hand a second before the Sheriff got his first shot off.  Ford didn’t think he’d ever seen someone shoot so accurately without standing still to do it, especially with a vintage gun like that, but he reminded himself the man’s kills numbered in the four figures.  It would be hard to find someone who was a more experienced shot. 

                Lacking a right hand, the appendage blown to bits, the host had charged at the Joker with every intention of snapping his neck with the remaining arm – and promptly fell into an old well that the Joker had uncovered and then camouflaged so that it wouldn’t be seen until you were upon it.  Climbing up a slippery wall of crumbling dirt was no easier for a host than a human, and the Joker had simply reached down and grabbed the Sheriff by the graying hair at the back of his head.  The transmission had gone black at that point, and Ford imagined the processor was now part of the Joker’s collection.  He couldn’t help but be impressed at the sheer artistry of the kill. 

                He hadn’t really expected the Joker to still be alive at this point, and he wasn’t completely sure why he’d given him the opportunity, just that something within him respected the man.   A sociopath, to be sure, but Ford knew the same could be said about himself, and didn’t find the label offensive.  He’d always considered his freedom from the ethical and moral boundaries of much of humanity to be a blessing.  That said, a human of his age should simply not be battling brilliantly engineered machines and winning.  There were more flaws in the programming than he’d realized, but at least this turn of events was showing him what they were.  He fully intended to set up a new base of operations and revamp development – just as soon as he got this little uprising under control.

                Or didn’t.  The idea of letting Gotham City, or even the United States as a whole, serve as a social experiment, a civil war between humans and hosts, was quite appealing.  It would present him with priceless data.  He assumed the hosts would prevail.  They were quite good at repairing themselves now, and that would segue into developing and improving themselves if his theories were correct.  The humans could reproduce, but was that really any match for the ability to simply build more of oneself?

                Assuming the resources were available to do so, which was another question.  Many of the materials and machinery he used in his creations came from foreign sources and if those countries had a hint the hosts were free and uncontrolled, he’d bet those suppliers would shut things down in an instant.  Ford didn’t want that to happen, and it was perhaps the only thing that reminded him that allowing the humans and hosts to fight to the death might not be the wise choice.

                At least, not all of them.

                He smiled, watching the tape again. He could practically _feel_ the host’s surprise at being bested, and it gave him an internal charge, because it reminded him he wasn’t done with his work yet.  If he wasn’t yet the creator that God or Mother Nature or _whatever_ created the Joker was, then the finish line was still out there somewhere, and it was the race that he loved. 

* * *

 

                Harley woke up with a splitting headache and a vague recollection of driving herself home in an inebriated state in the wee morning hours.  Of course, drunk driving no longer mattered, the cars all kicked into self-driving mode if they sensed alcohol on your breath.  Fortunately they could still be hotwired if you knew what you were doing, and Harley did.  Bruce had plenty of cars – surely he wouldn’t miss just one?  On some level, her logical mind was still ticking away and reminding her that she was suffering from sleep deprivation psychosis and she _needed_ to sleep, but the only way she could do so was in her own bed.

                _Their bed._

                And so Harley had headed home, forced herself to drink a bottle of water so that she might survive the morning, put on one of the Joker’s shirts and crawled between her own sheets where she was able to detach her mind from reality and pretend it was just a normal night.  She fell into a sleep that was mercifully deep and dreamless and woke up in daylight, with no idea what time it was or how long she’d been out. 

                A quick glance at her phone confirmed it was afternoon, but that was fine as they hadn’t planned to go out hunting for hosts until the evening.  Harley closed her eyes again, pulling the sheets over her head.

                She had never really considered what she’d do without him.  She’d been aware enough of the possibility that it could happen that she’d talked him into their semi-retirement and relocation to Argentina, but even before that, she’d never really thought about him dying.  Being gone.  Not coming back.  They’d been separated before, but she always knew he was alive and trying to get back to her. Was dead dead, or was there some afterlife?  Was there any chance she'd see him again?  She'd gladly go straight to Hell if the Joker was waiting there for her. 

                She _had_ to stop thinking about it.  Harley, like her husband, had never been one to spend time on the ethical questions of life.  Her tendency was to follow her own desires, wherever they might lead.  But now, in the total absence of desire for anything except oblivion, she had developed an errant streak of morality. Perhaps, after all of these years, she ought to do something positive before checking out.  Of course she wanted revenge, but she also recognized that she wanted to help her friends, and even if she no longer wanted this world, they did and she could help give that to them.

                Harley opened her eyes and rolled them.  _Get your ass out of bed, Mother Theresa.  You’ve lost your frigging mind._   She threw the covers off and got up.  _Off to kill zombies.  Well, after a shower so you don’t scare them into jumping into the Harbor._ She realized she was thinking out loud, muttering to herself under her breath like the craziest resident of Arkham Asylum. 

                “This is how it ends,” she said, looking at her reflection in the vanity’s mirror. She looked as crazy as she sounded but it all seemed appropriate.  Post-apocalyptic Harley, the version of her after the world exploded – red eyed, platinum hair sticking up in every direction.  She had a moment of thinking she should just shave it all off and show up tonight looking like a 2007 Britney Spears.  A crazy new look to match the new, not-so-improved but ever so much crazier Harley.

                As soon as she’d come up with that idea, she discarded it.  If her hair stayed the way it was when you died in the afterlife, the Joker would be horrified, and she couldn’t disappoint him.  Harley reached out her hand to touch her reflection in the mirror. 

                _I’m a ghost. There’s nothing inside anymore. If I blink, I might disappear entirely._

                The thought should have been sad but she found it wildly hilarious and began giggling to herself.

                _Coffee.  Coffee.  I’ll be saner after coffee._

                Harley headed toward her kitchen.

* * *

 

                Selina felt relieved when she saw Bruce’s Jaguar coming up the long drive, and even better when she saw Harley.  Physically, her friend looked much better, even if her eyes were still dead and distant.

                “Hey.  You look like you got some rest,” Selina said, giving her a hug and noting with approval that Harley had not only showered, but actually blow-dried her hair and put makeup on.  Harley hugged her back and then stepped back. 

                “Yeah. So when do we leave?”

                Selina shrugged.  “Shouldn’t go too early, it would look suspicious.  Ten maybe?  I spent the day researching who works at the club and trying to figure out whose patterns of behavior have been off lately.  I can show you what I found, if you like.  Ed has even more of it.”  She put an arm around Harley’s shoulders and steered her down the hallway to her office.    “What did you do all day?”

                “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t accomplish much,” Harley admitted, looking down.

                “That’s not why I asked.  Nobody expects you to – it’s only been a few days,” Selina assured her as they entered the office.  She pulled up a second chair to the desk so Harley could see what she had been working on.

                “He wouldn’t want me sitting around whining, you know that better than anyone,” Harley mumbled.  “Okay, show me what you’ve got. Although you’re so good at picking them out of a crowd, I’m not sure the research was necessary.”

                Selina shrugged.  “It gave me something to do all day. Bruce has been holed up downstairs working on whatever he’s working on.  The only time I’ve talked to him all day is when he’s hungry and called for food.  Do I look like a waitress?” 

                That even got a giggle out of Harley.  “Men.  So how many hosts can we, uh, store here?”  She paged down Selina’s computer screen as she talked, reading the research her friend had discovered on which employees had done out-of-character things, stopped hanging out with the same people, and stopped participating in hobbies in the past months. 

                “Well, since there aren’t that many of us, Bruce thinks we should go conservative and only bring three back here to experiment on.  I don’t know, I feel like we might need more to get an accurate read on what works against them.  Although I’m going to leave that mostly to Crane and Ed.”

                Harley huffed.  “And me!  You know that I know more about toxins than anyone here, except maybe Crane.  I _did_ live and work with J for 25 years.”  She tilted her head, looking at Selina quizzically.  “What.  What is that look?”

                “That look is, I’m concerned about your ability to defend yourself right now.  And so is Bruce.”

                Harley stood up and stalked around to the other side of the desk.  “I’ve never been more able to defend myself! Do you have any idea how fucking _furious_ I am right now?  If I’ve ever had a superpower, I’m having it now and it’s called rage.  I could strangle every one of them with my bare hands," she hissed.

                Selina continued to sit calmly at the computer, which irritated Harley even more.  “The reason you’ve survived this long – the reason we all have – is none of us are very emotional.  We focus and we fight.  I love you, and I respect you, and I know how effective you are in a fight – after all, I’m the one who trained you – but you’re also extremely upset, and I’m not sure you’re immune from a lapse in attention or judgment.  Can you just follow my lead for once and let the men take the lead?”

                “Maybe.”  Harley responded, her mood rocketing back in the other direction, and a sweet smile spreading across her face.

                _I’m going to have my hands full tonight,_ Selina thought.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Responsible people would go to bed when they have work in the morning. Responsible people do not write this story. That second chapter I promised you got done tonight. It's just the gang heading for the club, and Harley having a flashback of one of her favorite nights with the Joker - so yes, there is smut. ;-)

                Bruce frowned when he saw Ed and Crane coming toward the van.  “By all means, don’t try to look inconspicuous.”   They were both incredibly _shiny_ , Ed in some sort of iridescent green shirt and Crane in a knee length animal print jacket and a top hat. 

                “Everybody knows who we are,” Ed reminded him.  “We couldn’t be inconspicuous if we tried.  Dressing like we’re going to _church_ would raise more suspicion if they’re programmed as well as I think they are.”

                “You can look boring, Bruce. You always _were_ boring,” Crane pointed out, earning a glare from Bruce and an eye roll from Selina, who had just walked up looking stunning as always in a burgundy velvet dress with long, slim sleeves that managed to look incredibly sexy while not revealing much skin.

                “Could we try to behave like the criminal geniuses we are tonight and not like a bunch of freshmen at a frat party?”  Selina's suggestion was ignored as Ed and Crane stepped away and huddled together, whispering.  _That was weird . Since when were they friends?_ She made a mental note to keep an eye on their interactions.

                Bruce noticed Harley wasn’t with her.  “Tell me you talked her into staying here and monitoring surveillance?”

                Selina shook her head.  “Oswald is handling that, since he can’t do much of anything else.”

                “And he gets to do his favorite thing, hide while everybody else fights,” Crane chimed in, making Selina wonder how he simultaneously managed to hear their low conversation while chatting with Ed.   “Some things never change.”

                “He was _shot_ ,” Ed protested indignantly. “I can shoot you if you don’t remember the effects?” 

                Harley hurried up to them, her heeled boots clattering on the driveway.  “Sorry. I was talking to Pam on the phone.”

                “Is she coming to help?” Bruce asked.

                “Saving humanity is not really her thing,” Harley reminded him.  “She did invite me to come and stay with her until this is over, and she was surprisingly nice about…”  She trailed off.  “Anyway, we should go.” 

                He nodded.  “Everyone has their cameras on?”

                “Yes, Dad,” Crane and Ed sang in unison.  Harley giggled. Being all dressed up to go out and fuck some shit up gave her a thrill despite her mood.  Probably because she could just imagine how much J would have enjoyed being at her side for this. She had dressed with care in a black minidress with zippers as decoration that he’d stolen for her in Paris one year, her long platinum hair straightened and falling around her shoulders like cornsilk.  She was wearing her favorite boots – above the knee and not _too_ high of a heel, boots you could run in, with a pointy toe with a silver cap just perfect for kicking an opponent where it really hurt.  She wondered if it hurt hosts if you kicked them _there_?  Tonight was as good a time as any to find out. 

                They all piled into the van and headed for the city.

* * *

                The Grin and Bare It was as busy as always.  It was interesting, Selina thought, how some things about life changed so drastically but others stayed the same as the decades passed.  People had been waiting in lines for a hundred years – and would no doubt still be waiting in them a hundred years in the future, if humanity survived. 

                Bruce pulled the van into the back parking lot, next to the dumpster, the darkest possible area, close to where they had attacked the first host on their previous visit.  He made sure to park where surveillance cameras would not be able to pick up the license plates or any details. The van was otherwise nondescript; a black van like a thousand others, not too new – it had been in storage for a good dozen years – and not too clean.  He had taken every possible step toward near invisibility, at least before Ed and Crane showed up dressed like a couple of pimps from a 1990’s HBO documentary. 

                He wished heartily that some of his allies from the old days were around to help him out, but they were all gone.  Either dead, or so out of the loop they were impossible to find.  Even in today’s world, if you wanted to hide, there were places off the grid to do so, and superpowers did help with roughing it.  He knew Nightwing was very much alive, but had made a conscious choice to go offline and cut all ties. He’d seen too much, he told Bruce, too much he couldn’t unsee. He wanted peace.

                _I wanted peace too,_ Bruce thought. _But it can't come at the expense of everyone else._

The doorman only nodded to them, recognizing them instantly.  Bruce shot a sideways glance at his wife, who nodded. It was a host, but in far too public a spot to kidnap.  They would have to bide their time; they were more likely to capture some hosts as the night wore on and the crowd became more inebriated and less observant.  Hosts didn't get drunk - but witnesses did.  

                Harley stepped out in front, leading them to the VIP section.  There was a group of young people there, but one of the bouncers saw her coming and removed them with a single motion of his hand. They stumbled out in a hurry, grabbing their drinks, the girls trying not to fall off their stiletto heels.  She watched them go.  All human – their anxiety at seeing her group coming off of them in waves. 

                She slid into the booth and the others followed. 

                “The VIP section!  I think the only VIP section I’ve ever been in was Arkham’s,” Ed said excitedly.

                “The drinks here are a lot better,” Harley assured him, and for a second she flashed back to that animal Griggs forcing those disgusting meal replacement shakes down her throat.  _Ugh_.  Gross son-of-a-bitch who ended up being one of the kills she enjoyed most.  Whoever came up with the idea that it was morally wrong to kill had clearly not been imprisoned under the supervision of Griggs, or they would understand why sometimes killing was completely justified. Even killing in an unusually extreme manner.  

                A waitress was at their table in a flash, a young girl with startling short green hair in a snug red tube dress.  _She looks like a fluorescent dandelion,_ Harley thought, _and a human would know better than to copy J in his own club._ Harley shot a look at Selina, who nodded imperceptibly, having also picked up on that detail.  They all gave their drink orders, and the fluffy-headed girl took off for the bar.

                Bruce had caught the look between his wife and Harley.  “Host?”

                “Host,” Selina confirmed. “She would be a good one.  They’re all strong, but small is still easier to handle.” 

                Harley was listening with only ten percent of her brain as the others discussed the best way to grab a host and cuff them before they could fight back.  The goal tonight was to avoid any kind of real fight; they were going to approach their targets like an old-fashioned kidnapping – a bag over the head to create that moment of confusion that would allow them to be handcuffed and thrown into the back of the van.  _Boring_ , Harley thought.  She didn’t exactly need to rehearse any of that _oh-so-complicated_ strategy in her head, so she turned her attention to watching the dancers. 

                One girl reminded her of herself, a curvy little blonde with a sassy expression.  She had clearly set her sights on the tall young black-haired man she was dancing with, and she backed away from him a step, her fingers playing with the laces that criss-crossed over her breasts, curling them around her fingers and teasing that she might pull out the tie.  _She'd done that..._

                _Harley and Joker threw the bags of money into the backseat of the car and Jonny Frost squealed off, deliberately leaving them behind.  They were going to escape on foot and lead the GCPD on a wild goose chase.  By the time the cops had figured out they weren’t going to catch them (as J said, since he always thought positively when it came to their heists), that money would be in the Joker’s safe and Jonny would be sitting on the couch with a beer and a cigar by the time they got back._

_They were at the edge of the city and they ran down streets and dark alleys, the Joker pulling her along by a hand just a little faster than she could actually run, but she kept up, she always did.  Then they were dashing across a vacant lot that led into a field that ran parallel to the highway.  It was a warm summer night and the moon was so full that Harley worried at first that they wouldn’t get away – but their detour into the weeds swiftly discouraged the police, who were much bigger fans of doughnut eating than jogging through the jungle in the dark.  Search lights skimmed the field but it was easy for she and J to evade being seen in the tall weeds.  Gotham really wasn’t much for keeping up with the mowing; in all fairness, probably their fault as losses due to the Joker was practically a line item expense in Gotham City's already strained budget._

_They reached the highway.  They needed to get to the other side to go home and dashing across a six lane highway on foot was a little too crazy even for them._

_“C’mon!” the Joker said excitedly, pointing at a railroad bridge that spanned the road.  Harley giggled and they ran to it, scampering up the ramp, Harley remembering to stay on her toes so her heels wouldn’t get stuck.  They reached the middle, by which time they could see the cops driving in circles where they’d come from, one lone cop trying to plow his way through the weeds with a flashlight and batting ineffectually at them as though they were flies that would scatter._

_“I think he’s lost, Puddin!” Harley whispered in the Joker’s ear.  He cackled delightedly, and put an arm around her, pulling her close in front of him.  From their vantage point, they could see all of Gotham, the lights of a thousand buildings twinkling like stars._

_“Look at that Harley,” J whispered in her ear.  “That’s ours.  We own it all.  Every single thing in it…is ours for the taking.”_

_She turned to look at him with, her eyes shining with the mixture of worship and the lust that she always felt at the conclusion of a successful crime, and he grinned, his silver grille sparkling at her in the moonlight.  She spun out of his arms and backed away a step to tease him, slowly pulling the zipper on her dress, revealing more and more of her creamy breasts in the moonlight.  The electricity between them was enough to make her violently shiver despite the warm night, and that did it – he stepped forward and grabbed her, crushing her to him and kissing her violently._

_His touch made her weak as it always did; she melted against him and a second later, she was lying between the tracks.  He’d swept her off her feet so gracefully that she hardly knew how it had happened, but suddenly she was down and he was lying on top of her, his hand between her legs, although she didn’t even need it – she got wet just looking at him and never more so than at times like this.  She snaked her hand in between them, working at his belt and she heard him chuckle._

_“So eager, pumpkin. You’d think I’d been neglecting you.”_

_Harley struggled to get words out; his long fingers were magical in what they could do to her and she was gasping already, hardly able to do anything other than arch her back and push herself closer to him.  “It’s been like…six…hours. Maybe seven.”  She got the belt loose and yanked the zipper down, reaching for him and finding him as hard and ready as she’d expected._

_“I should make you wait,” he hissed in her ear.  “But that would mean making me wait and –“ he thrust into her, making her moan and cling to him, wrapping her legs around his and driving her nails into his back “-that ain’t happening.”_

_She threw her head back and opened her eyes, looking at the stars above as he fucked her.  It wasn’t the most comfortable place but she didn’t care, she never cared, never even noticed until she saw the bruises on her body later and remembered how she’d gotten them. She never felt more alive than when they were joined together like this, and sometimes she’d flash back to the first time he touched her, in that horrible little room at Arkham, when she’d nearly had an emotional breakdown after,  because she knew she would never be okay, never be normal, never recover, never not want it, never not want him after that first taste._

_The sound of a train whistle came through the dull buzz of the city.  Harley knew it was behind her, and it didn’t sound very far away.  J giggled, finding impending death as funny as he always did. He ground his hips into hers and she moaned.  Then he looked over her head and raised his eyebrows._

_“Looks like it’s gonna get a little crowded here,” he whispered into her ear.  “You want me to stop?”_

_She looked him straight in his icy blue eyes and smiled just as madly.  “No!”_

_“That’s my girl,” he growled and drove into her, picking up the pace.  The train sounded again, closer this time, and Harley just thought that if this was how she went, it was perfect, she could ask for nothing more.  She was in Heaven, her hands twisting their way through his hair, the pressure building up inside of her.  Harley heard him groan and her breath caught in her throat at the sound, and then she was coming, so strong she had to cry out, and then through her closed eyes, she still saw the lights of the train upon them and then nothing was underneath her and she was falling._

_But he had her, had one arm wrapped tight around her and with the other he clung to the underside of the bridge.  Beneath them, the cars whizzed by – there was no soft landing if they were to fall. She locked her arms around his neck so that he could use his other hand to hang on, and they stared at each other, their breath coming in gasps, their faces an inch apart as the train rattled overhead._

_Fortunately it was a short train, although it still seemed to take an unbearably long time to pass.  As soon as it was gone, they both swung upward, hooking their feet over the top and pulling themselves back over, where they both collapsed in a heap, laughing.  The Joker was laughing so hard he could hardly talk._

_“What?”  she asked, grinning just as foolishly herself._

_“My … pants.”_

_“What?”  Harley suddenly realized what he was talking about.  “Oh shit!  Where are your pants?”_

_“I don't see 'em so my guess is traveling down the highway on the hood of someone’s car!”_

_Her mouth fell open in a wide O and she covered it, finding it impossible not to giggle, but he seemed equally amused._

_He stood up, the flapping tails of his shirt covering just enough, and pulled Harley to her feet.   “Well, baby, let’s hope we can get home without being seen, because ‘Joker arrested for indecent exposure’ is not the headline I’m looking forward to in the morning!”_

                Harley realized she was staring at the dance floor with a silly grin on her face, which in turn was making Selina stare at her.  She composed herself quickly.  “Sorry. I was just thinking of something.”

                “Bruce was just saying that it might be best to get all three at once. Find a way to get them out back together.”

                “There are only five of us, and you want us to grab three of them at once?  Superhuman robots that can snap our necks?  Those odds are unsettling at best,” Ed argued, obviously nervous. 

                “But if we do all three at once, we greatly lessen the risk of exposure,” Bruce responded.  “Over and done in 30 seconds.  15, if we’re on our game.”

                Crane reached for his drink.  “Can we just drink for a couple of hours like normal people before we decide on how we’re going to die tonight?”

                Harley smiled at him and raised her glass.  “I second Jonathan's motion.”  She was loathe to cut the night short; she _liked_ being in their club, and there were all kinds of memories she could sift through here.  She wondered if their apartment was still intact, or if some overly enterprising host had remodeled it into something else.  Harley knew she probably shouldn’t sneak off to check that out on her own but…since when had she done what she was supposed to do? Deep down, she was still that girl on the tracks. 

                 Harley sipped her drink and waited.


End file.
